The recent hijacking of 2 domains held in ownership by CheckFree.com is a scary turn of events in the dark world of phishing, DNS poisoning and now, domain theft. Checkfree.com and MyCheckFree.com were stolen on Tuesday when someone with access to login credentials managed to access the domain control panel and change the name servers.

Authorities found out that the domains were redirected to a blank page with a strong suspicion that hackers were trying to install malware that would infect the visitors computers when redirected to this new page. Fortunately, as reported by The Register, the legal owners of the sites managed to recover the two domains before any harm could be done.

The two domains were registered at Network Solutions, and according to their spokeswoman, Susan Wade, someone logged in with CheckFree’s credentials and changed the nameservers to point to an Ukrainian IP Address.

Lessons to be learnt!

CheckFree.com is a very huge and critical online company that serves millions of customers and handles numerous bill payments. Some of the services are military credit accounts, utility bill payments, insurance premium payments, loan settlement and mortgage payment; to name a few. If big companies, such as CheckFree.com, can be victims of domain hijacking (who must be spending thousands per month on security), we are surely in no way safe. This is especially applicable to people who are on less secured and low profile hosting companies where money is paramount to client welfare. Consider the same thing happening to Paypal.com, Moneybookers.com or BankofAmerica.com! The end results would be utter disaster for individuals, and businesses alike.

How to avoid your domain name being hijacked

There are no steadfast ways to avoid this situation. As long as there exist ways to expose your login credentials to a third party, you should be prepared to bid farewell to your domain name at any instant. The number one reason for domain thefts is email hacking. Email hacking does not only affect webmasters, anyone can become a victim to this criminal activity. Maybe the name Sarah Palin should ring a bell

If the email used for registering a domain is hacked, its very easy to change the password to the domain host and change the parameters within the domain admin panel. I will not go into the details of how emails are hacked for two reasons:

• its off the scope for this post (or this blog for that matter)
• I am not too keen to entice uninvited or unwanted visitors to this blog

But I would give you ways in which you can avoid, or at least minimize the possibility of your domain being stolen.

Yes, how?

First of all, lets discuss the don’t s of domain registration….

The Don’t s

1) Don’t use the free email services (Yahoo, Gmail, Live, etc) for your domain registration process. If you Google “how to hack an email account”, you would be presented with hundreds of articles giving exact steps on how to go about hacking these free email accounts. Anyone with time on their hands can access your email within a few hours.

2) Don’t use your domain name email accounts either. Reason being, if your domain is hijacked, you loose access to your email account too.

3) Don’t ever access your domain control panel from a shared or public computer. No matter what the circumstances, delay accessing your account until your reach home or find a secure networked computer. Public computers are prone to keystroke loggers and Trojans. Even if the computer is secure from these spy ware, accessing confidential information in public and forgetting to sign out can cause a very serious security issue.

The Do’s

1) Do spend a few more bucks to signup for a secure email service that you can use for your domain registration process. While paid email services is not a guarantee for 100% security, you can least expect to minimize the possibility of your account being hacked.

2) Do change your login credentials at regular intervals. This is the abc’s of online security and I don’t think I need to explain the benefits of regularly changing your email or domain admin panel passwords.

3) Do signup for extra verification services, such as Moniker’s MaxLock service. Maxlock is a paid service that requires an additional verification before a domain is transferred to another registrar or changes need to be done to the name server settings. MaxLock has a price tag of $34.95; a bit expensive for regular domain owners. But if you consider the after effects of your domain name theft, this $34.95 might seem like the best investment you will ever make.

I hope this brief guide serves as an awareness on the risks we face online. Please don’t see this as another blog entry trying to gain attention. Cyber-crime is increasing on a daily basis and if you fail to take precautions on each move you make online, you could very well fall victims to these unethical practices; similar to what CheckFree.com faced.

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