David Airey is a classic example of an unfortunate person who got hit by unscruptous hackers crackers hoping to profiteer from his hard-earned site. David blames his stolen domain on a GMail security flaw (now patched of course), but that’s only half the problem. It has shown that there is not enough done to curb domains being stolen.
Lost your domain? Go public
That’s what David did. He posted it on his alternate blog address. Fortunately his blog is popular enough that that story ended up on Digg and Sphinn. That’s not all folks. These articles were so popular that it ended up on numerous places (talk about link bait). Things have a way of coming around. Want to know where did his famous post ended up on?
–New York Times
–Digg
–Reddit
–Lifehacker
–StumbleUpon
–Tons of others
So, what happens to the domain? David gets back his rightfully owned domain. While Godaddy (where the domain was transfered to) was unwilling to return the domain at first, some loyal visitors had a talk with the founder and co., getting them into returning the domain. So, who wins? The people, and some pretty awesome linkbait.
You may be wondering what happens to that cracker. After having him “exposed” to the public about his deeds, he may not attempt to steal another domain anytime soon.
The added bonus
If you managed to pull all of that off, you get… thousands of links and visitors. Kind of a nice “compensation” for your time and worry of your precious domain being stolen ain’t it?
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From all the stories I here godaddy.com seems to be where the domain ends up! Wonder if they have something to do with it! I lost a domain in this way (I don’t use gmail) and it ended up being hosted by godaddy.com and so did my friends domain.
Probably people should start boycotting godaddy.com in protest of being willing participants in this practice! If they have proof of the name being hijacked/stolen they should quite simply do the honest thing and give it back to the rightful owner.