Is Your Domain Safe?
This is the important question you should ask yourself often. Yes, this November is the worst month for some of the webmasters as their domains stolen and parked/redirected to some thing else.
As many of you know that Makeuseof.com faced the same issue and brought back after 2day long fight with the guy who stolen it and their hosing company Godaddy. And now the other popular domain yump3.org stud in the victim list. Interestingly all these happening by hacking your Gmail password and keeping mail forward to hackers mail box.
The technique hackers using here is very simple:
- Hacked the Gmail Password and login to your Gmail
- Filter the incoming mails from Godaddy and forward to hackers mail box
- Request for domain password change or search for password stored in your Inbox
- That’s it login to domain with the password like official guy and redirect domain to some other Hosting company or park that domain
- What’s more you already lost your domain
What they want back from you? In the case of Makeuseof.com, here is the message sent by hacker:
Hi there,
I said it very simply and very easily !
$2 K !
Deal or not ?!
You own the domain I get the money…
Regards
So apart from taking several safety measures to save your domains, Also check your mail account often to make sure that your mails are not going out anywhere with forward option.
So first check your Gmail: Settings->Filters->Check for any filter that forwarding mails to any other mail account
And also check Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP->Forward a copy of incoming mail to option to find any unknown email id taking your mails out.
Hurry up! Check your mail accounts Have you ever faced this? Share with us! Happy Blogging!
Heard about makeuseof from some technews sites.
The technique is very simple and it sucks for the blog owners.
@Steve Jab,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Really it sucks when domain lost. Bad guys don’t know our hard work to build that sites.
I checked my Gmail
As far as understand from different descriptions there is no password crack in the start, exploit supposedly works by setting filters without actual access to gmail account. Why set filters if you have full access already?
Still it’s supposed to be fixed so it’s either new attack or some people just had filters sitting in for months (makeuseof com describes such situation in their last post on topic) without noticing. I mean what amount of people checks their filter settings at all?
@Wtop,
Bad guys will Do Bad things
Thanks for your comments.
@Rarst,
May be am not sure on makeuseof issue fully.
But as you said most of the people won’t look at their setting. As a reminder i wrote this article to them
I don’t think any domain safe at the moment to be infact all are sading about Gmail no email is to be safe,any email or domain can be easily hacked .It really coming down to how much secure our passwords are how strong they are,even though we use strong passwords tehy are getting hacked.
@Venkat,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes Venkat now a days nothing is safe online. We can’t protect if the real hackers are tying to hit us
Anyway we need to take some known measures atleast.
Just today afternoon I switched my domain registration id to my yahoo one… Gmail sucks in security
@Pavan,
Good thing you did and reminded me
Thanks yar…wanna Do same now.
Waw! its inspired me a lot. Thanks for your sharing.
well, I don’t think that there’s any flaw in Gmail. I guess you must have read comments @ Digg.
If you are not careful about your mail account, then hacker can hack any email regardless of the fact that it is GMail or sth else.
After more than four years of existence, I refuse to believe that there’ll be any security flaw in GMail system.
@IngOng,
Thanks for your great comments.
Keep coming
@whibb,
First Thanks for sharing your opinion on the article.
Whibb agree with we should say lack of carefulness with the users.Any mail a/c can be hacked easily these days. Finally we are users need to take care.
Here my intension is not to project or blame Gmail
I love it love it love it. and am the user of it starting from my web career.
I only wanted to share those 2 tips which i specified with screenshots.Those are basics we can prevent some kind of threats from hackers
I changed my blogspot alerts to Hotmail
Thanks for the tip Lax.
[...] Is Your Domain Safe? Posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 in Blog Tips – Comments: (15) This is the important question you should ask yourself often. Yes, this November is the worst month for some of the webmasters as their domains stolen and parked/redirected to some thing else.As many of you know that Makeuseof.com faced the same issue and brought back after 2day long fight with the guy who stolen it and their hosing company Godaddy. [...]
I never used forwarding option, but you are right lax we should check it up periodically and make sure it does not happens.
I can’t believe there were people like that… We must create a many email accounts for our important things for our blog like domain name and Hosting emails and also the Adsense email….
Try to make a password that include special characters so that they can’t read it easily or type easily…
Luckily I don’t own many domains. But have to take care of my own domain now which is fazreen.com