ICANN Loses Control of Its Own Domain Names

NotNormallyNormal writes "CBC picked up an AP story about ICANN recently losing control over two of their domain names on Thursday, June 26. A domain registrar run by the group transferred the domains to someone else. ICANN's press release had this to say: 'As has been widely reported, a number of domain names, including icann.com and iana.com were recently redirected to different DNS servers, allowing a group to provide visitors to those domains with their own website. It would appear the attack was sophisticated, combining both social and technological techniques, but was also limited and focused.' Comcast has had similar troubles lately as well."

Might be good for something

Maybe this'll show them what needs to be changed in the system. Also, err, first post? How?

Re:Might be good for something

Also, err, first post? How?

I hear a group of rogue trolls tricked ICANN into making Slashdot.org resolve to goatse.cx. You must've come back at the right time (or wrong time, depending on whether you're into the kind of stuff ;))

A new press release was issued, looks bleak :-(

Marina del Rey, CA (July 5, 2008) --

ENUF. :-( ICANN HAS MY DOMAINS PLZ?

About ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a technical coordination body for the Internet. Created in October 1998 by a broad coalition of the Internet's business, technical, academic, and user communities, ICANN is assuming responsibility for a set of technical functions previously performed under U.S. government contract by IANA and other groups.

In a perfect world

In a perfect world, this would serve as a wake-up call to ICANN that the current domain name policies are hideously flawed.

Of course, their heads are so far up their collective asses, though, that they'll just say it was an awesome example of domain tasting by a third party, and all part of the glorious monstrosity they have birthed.

HaHa

Ha Ha

/nelson

Re:

Memes like the nelson laugh, beowulf cluster, soviet russia, etc are redundant because we get them all the time.

Re:

Mentioning that those memes are redundant is redundant because it gets mentioned all the time ;)

Re:

Maybe the post was considered redundant because that's the obvious reaction to the story?

Sophisticated ?

It's obvious [dnsstuff.com] they didn't follow their own rules by providing valid whois contact information [icann.org].

Re:Sophisticated ?

ICANN, as far as I can tell, does not follow rules. Their one and only purposes seems to be to enrich the members of its board. As a result, we have a stagnant generic TLD system with new proposals, etc being designed to extract cash for them rather than benefit the world. I have no problem with them getting hacked -- throws a spotlight on their arrogance and corruption.

ICANN'T do anything to help the world because I am too busy getting paid.

Re:Sophisticated ?

Perhaps you can explain what is not valid in the WHOIS information for these domains?

Social Engineering to Take Over Entire TLDs

When I first read this news several days ago, I thought it was referring to the root servers ...

What most don't know is that the TLDs (ie. com, .net, etc) themselves are registered in much the same manner as 2nd level domains are ... see the TLD Whois: http://whois.iana.org/ [iana.org]

The major TLDs (.com, .net, etc) are relatively safe, since any changes would likely be difficult to get through - with any changes quickly noticed ... as in within minutes, or even seconds; likely wouldn't even be that effective, since the most popular TLDs zone dns entries are heavily cached.

However, ccTLDs are a different story completely, since ccTLD zone name server changes are more common and thus such change requests would be far less scrutinized.

I've never heard of any TLD being hijacked, but could likely be easily done, since the social engineering involved would be very similar. A frightening prospect.

Ron

URL

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/04/icann-pwned.html

Anyone else think the URL is hilarious?

Re:

It is! Very strange.... Now, you need to ask yourself, Did they pick that out themselves or did Wordpress (or whatever) generate it for them? *giggle*

Why do we need registrars?

Why do registrars even have to exist? And why does ICANN need to pay other companies to run the actual DNS infrastructure? If ICANN ran .com, .org and .net itself, and there were no registrars/resellers, and every time someone paid for a domain all the money went straight to ICANN, surely ICANN would have enough money to run all the DNS infrastructure itself very well. Then we wouldn't have to deal with all the dodgy things that registries and registrars do, like Verisign's "Site Finder", and various slightly evil registrars stealing domains, and various registrars being incredibly insecure and transferring domains to hackers without proper authentication.

Re:Why do we need registrars?

If they did that, it'd be Network Solutions all over again. Remember their exorbitant monopoly prices when they were the only shop in town? Like that.

No problem!

They had no problem getting the domains back. They just kept saying to themselves, "I think ICANN! I think ICANN!"

ICANN and IANA it's been a stormy affair

well, Without them There wouldn't be an internet, for one.

After reading their news release, this goes from "whoo 31337 h4x0r5 shr R Sm4r7" to disgruntaled soon to be ex employee getting he and and all his friends 12 year domains for free for as long as the DNS record is changed. It was an inside job by someone who had access to the Registrar's internal network.

Whoever made the change knew the system and how ICANN and IANA work, and also knew that ICANN can not really say 'well if you got your domain durin

The quality of Journalism?

Hmm, in the CBC article is says "Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization's main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org, neither of which was affected by the attack."

What is to *re*direct here? DNS is there to translate domain names into IP addresses. It does not have any *re*direction mechanisms. Redirection is a feature of the HTTP protocol and would require to compromise the web-server (which they state has not happened.)

I wonder, Is this simply a typo or does the journalist/editor not understand what (s)he is writing about (and has no references to have this proof read)?

I'm rather vary, because I see such factual errors often in widely read media, written and edited by journalists. Sometimes I see even "experts" quoted with wrong statements. How does this reflect on news that I don't know so much about that I can spot the factual errors?

Re:

Being directed and being redirected are REALLY subtle differences in the mind of a techno-plebe. And no, in Canada, there is no requirement for journalists to hold CS degrees.

So, when something's directed to one place, and then directed to another place, it's not strange for a reporter to assume that it was redirected, as opposed to newly directed.

Re:

You're being deliberately pedantic. I thought it was perfectly clear exactly what they meant:

Normally, A records for icann.com, www.icann.com, iana.com, www.iana.com and similar FQDNs point to IP addresses of web servers that are configured to send an HTTP redirect (via the Location header) that tells the browser to request e.g. http://www.icann.org/ [icann.org] if http://www.icann.com/ [icann.com] had been originally requested.

While more technically specific, this takes a lot more words to say than "Visitors to those addresses a

Re:

"simply point to the same web IP address, which is presumably served by the same server. In my book this is hardly a mirror, which would imply it is somewhat fault tolerant."

Or the IP is, you know, a Virtual IP on server load balancers and they can host the website on one thousand different servers at the same time for all you know?

Re:

ICANN needs to be ICANNED?

Thanks! Try the veal and tip your waitress!

Re:You pay for *incoming* messages? What the...

here comes the -1, I don't get it / -1, I don't like you

No, I'd say -1 Offtopic is sufficient, no need to invent new reasons to mod you down :-)

Re:lastweeksnews

I submitted this a week ago and a firehose reader modded it down quickly.
What changed to make this important now if it wasn't important then?

Now it's old news and thus suitable for Slashdot. Before it was rough hot-off-the-press stuff.

We don't do that sort of thing here.