NYT: Purloined Domain Name Is an Unsolved Mystery

[DeepModem Mom]

Purloined Domain Name Is an Unsolved Mystery
By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: January 18, 2005


It was yet another reminder of how vulnerable a company's brand name can be in the world of electronic commerce.

In the space of about 48 hours over the weekend, Panix.com, New York City's oldest commercial Internet service provider, saw its name slip out of its control and become the center of an international cyberhunt to get it back. Whether maliciously or inadvertently, the company's main domain name - panix.com - had somehow been transferred to a company in Australia.

Mail to users with a panix.com address was suddenly being sent to a server computer in Canada that had no relation to the company. And in Vancouver, Wash., Panix's registrar - the broker responsible for securing rights to the domain name and administering its use - was completely unaware that the name had been pinched.

By yesterday evening, things were mostly back to normal at Panix. But finger-pointing continued, and the incident served as a reminder that, for all of the safeguards in place to protect one of the more valuable assets in online commerce - a company's domain name - those business addresses remain vulnerable to theft.

The panix.com incident follows other cases of Internet names being hijacked, including the temporary commandeering last fall of the domain name for eBay Germany (ebay.de), by a 19-year-old German man who said he had done it "just for fun."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/technology/18domain.html