Panix.com panic almost over
p2pnet.net News:- Panix.com says the panic over its hi-jacked name is almost over.
It was grabbed over the weekend by parties unknown and false information for the panix.com domain was present at the top-level Internet domain servers from 04:30 Saturday morning Jan 15 until 6 pm Sunday Jan 16 (US-EST) and email, Web access and other connectivity to the panix.com domain was disrupted.
Panix.com says it’s now back in control, but, “Due to the distributed nature of the Internet domain name system, we estimate that the false information will persist in some places until 6:15 PM Monday US-EST. Until then, if you have trouble reaching a panix.com site or sending mail to a panix.com customer, please try using the domain panix.net instead.”
The registration of the panix.com domain was moved to a company in Australia, the actual DNS records apparently went to a UK company with servers in Canada and corporate registration in Delaware, and panix.com’s mail was redirected to servers in Canada.
“None of the systems exploited to perform this hijacking were under Panix’s control,” says the company, going on:
“It’s not supposed to be possible to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another without notifying both the current registrar and the current domain owner, but that’s what seems to have happened.
“As the hijacking occurred over the weekend, we had great trouble reaching responsible parties at the other companies involved. The domain was not returned to us until the beginning of the business day in Australia on Monday. None of the companies involved had support numbers that were available over the weekend, or even emergency contact numbers.
“This hijacking involved multiple felonies here and abroad. Many members of law enforcement agencies in the US and at least three other countries have already been involved, and we hope that the perpetrator(s) will be caught.”
Temporary Workarounds
As a temporary workaround, Panix says services can be reached via the panix.net domain, by replacing “panix.com” with “panix.net” in an email address or URL.
“When contacting hosts that use SSL security (URLs that begin with ‘https’ rather than ‘http’, or SSL-wrapped services such as secure SMTP, secure IMAP, or secure POP), you will see a hostname error. The server will present a certificate that says it is ’something.panix.com’, and your browser or mail program, which expects to see ’something.panix.net’, will complain about the mismatch.
“This is an expected consequence of using the ‘panix.net’ workaround.”
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See:-
hi-jacked – Panix recovering from domain name hijacking, Panix.com, January 17, 2005
