The media has recently reported that several major brands suffered domain name hijacking attempts through social engineering. In a social engineering attack, an individual pretends to work for a company in order to make changes to the domain name records so that they can redirect the Web site.

Global IT Consultancy, Tata Consulting, and Chinese search engine Baidu.com (the eighth most popular Web site in the world*) all recently suffered domain name hijacking attempts. At the time, Tata Consulting used Network Solutions as its domain name registrar, and Baidu.com used Register.com. What do both of these registrars have in common?  Both registrars focus on individual retail customers and certain small to medium-sized businesses, not the needs of larger corporate customers.  

The attack on Baidu.com lasted approximately five hours. According to news reports, the hack occurred through an online chat with a technical staff member. The hacker redirected the Web site page that stated, "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army." For a Web site that has a high volume of traffic, even the smallest amount of downtime can be very damaging and cause a loss of revenue.

Most likely, cyber-activists will continue to aim at easy targets in order to get their messages across. If activist groups often protest your business, watch for social engineering attacks on your domain names. Other types of attacks on Web sites (such as denial-of-service attacks, wherein a hacker bombards a Domain Name Server (DNS) with millions of requests until it crashes) require the knowledge of a high-tech hacker. Social engineering attacks do not require specialized knowledge.  

To help prevent this type of hijacking, corporations can investigate the registrar of their active Web sites.  If you have registered your Web sites with companies that have suffered hijacking attempts, you should ask your registrar what security procedures it has in place to ensure it doesn’t happen to your company. Alternately, you could partner with a registrar that always provides high levels of security for corporations.

Unlike Network Solutions and Register.com, who have millions of individual customers, Corporation Service Company (CSC) focuses primarily on large online brands or substantial portfolios of domain names held by companies. At CSC, we ensure the security of our customers’ domain names by putting protocols in place to to validate requestors and their IP addresses. This can greatly reduce or even virtually eliminate the possibility of a domain name hijacking attack. 

As part of our full suite of domain and trademark management services, CSC can help keep your domain names safe from hijacking attempts. We offer customers the option of establishing a core domains account to lock their most critical domain names. This prevents domain names from being modified, transferred, or deleted. A core domains account also has even more stringent access protocols and procedures than “standard” names in your account.

To find out how CSC can help your company protect its domain names, please click here to request a consultation.

*According to Alexa.com on 2/19/2010

Sources:
Computerworld
Softpedia