Domain Hijacking – Part(2)

How the domain names are hijacked


To hijack a domain name, it’s necessary to gain access to the domain control panel of the target domain. For this you need the following ingredients

1. The domain registrar name for the target domain.

2. The administrative email address associated with the target domain.

These information can be obtained by accessing the WHOIS data of the target domain. To get access the WHOIS data, goto whois.domaintools.com, enter the target domain name and click on Lookup. Once the whois data is loaded, scroll down and you’ll see Whois Record. Under this you’ll get the “Administrative contact email address”.

To get the domain registrar name, look for something like this under the Whois Record. “Registration Service Provided By: XYZ Company”. Here XYZ Company is the domain registrar. In case if you don’t find this, then scroll up and you’ll see ICANN Registrar under the “Registry Data”. In this case, the ICANN registrar is the actual domain registrar.

The administrative email address associated with the domain is the backdoor to hijack the domain name. It is the key to unlock the domain control panel. So to take full control of the domain, the hacker will hack the administrative email associated with it. Email hacking has been discussed in my previous post how to hack an email account.

Once the hacker take full control of this email account, he will visit the domain registrar’s website and click on forgot password in the login page. There he will be asked to enter either the domain name or the administrative email address to initiate the password reset process. Once this is done all the details to reset the password will be sent to the administrative email address. Since the hacker has the access to this email account he can easily reset the password of domain control panel. After resetting the password, he logs into the control panel with the new password and from there he can hijack the domain within minutes.


How to protect the domain name from being hijacked


The best way to protect the domain name is to protect the administrative email account associated with the domain. If you loose this email account, you loose your domain. So refer my previous post on how to protect your email account from being hacked. Another best way to protect your domain is to go for private domain registration. When you register a domain name using the private registration option, all your personal details such as your name, address, phone and administrative email address are hidden from the public. So when a hacker performs a WHOIS lookup for you domain name, he will not be able to find your name, phone and administrative email address. So the private registration provides an extra security and protects your privacy. Private domain registration costs a bit extra amount but is really worth for it’s advantages. Every domain registrar provides an option to go for private registration, so when you purchase a new domain make sure that you select the private registration option.