On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Mark Jeftovic wrote:
Once upon a time, Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> said:
panix.com has apparently been hijacked. It's now associated with a different registrar -- melbourneit instead of dotster -- and a different owner. Can anyone suggest appropriate people to contact to try to get this straightened out?
Good luck dealing with melbourneit.com; that's the place where domains go to die.
I originally replied offlist, but...
Under the new ICANN transfer policy, this will most likely be reversed if its shown to be an improper transfer. You need to bring Dotster into this and they need to invoke a transfer dispute under the new policy.
The problem is that during that time panix and its users have suffered serious losses. They should never have allowed the transfer in the first place without authorization, so new ICANN policy is a problem, not a solution.
MelbourneIT needs to demonstrate a proper FOA (Form of Authorization) to have initiated the transfer and if its found to be invalid the domain will be re-instated and Melbourne-IT fined.
That means at least 24 hours for initial investigation and it likely will not happen until Monday (bad guys do these sort of things on weekends for a reason ...) and they probably will not act until Monday evening or longer (and that is at the same time when Verisign now allows "rapid" updates to zone file and could fix it very quickly). If I were Panix, I would get lawyers to draft and fax a nastygram letter to MelburneIT and somewhat similar letter to Verisign warning them of the liabilities involved in being accomplices to such a such a fraudulent and illegal actions and saying that every hour the situation is not fixed Panix losses continue to increase and somebody would have to pay, etc... But more important would be to actually call Verisign (their NOC) and complain loud and clear - if I remember when something like this happened about 2-3 years ago to another bix company they fixed it in < 12 hours. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william@elan.net