ICANN Loses Control of Its Own Domain Names 61
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Might be good for something (Score:5, Funny)
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 ;))
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Also, err, first post? How?
Everyone else was busy reading the article. ... You must be new here. (:
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ICANN needs to be ICANNED?
Thanks! Try the veal and tip your waitress!
A new press release was issued, looks bleak :-( (Score:2)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Ha Ha
/nelson
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Memes like the nelson laugh, beowulf cluster, soviet russia, etc are redundant because we get them all the time.
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Mentioning that those memes are redundant is redundant because it gets mentioned all the time ;)
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Maybe the post was considered redundant because that's the obvious reaction to the story?
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Exactly. That's what I would have written, although it's much more effective if you write "HAW HAW!"
Sophisticated ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sophisticated ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you can explain what is not valid in the WHOIS information for these domains?
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Perhaps you can explain what is not valid in the WHOIS information for these domains?
Perhaps you could open both links and see for yourself.
ICANN address from whois record [dnsstuff.com] (on domain):
Registrant:
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
(IANA) (IANA)
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292 US
Email: *****@icann.org
Administrative Co
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Kimba, Thanks for the backup, but this isn't what I was talking about. I wish I had taken a screenshot of it. When I did that same exact whois search, the information was completely different. It returned correctly, but it contained the organization's name and nothing else.
I would consider this whois info you just posted valid information (as far as I'm aware). I don't think an organization should be faulted for having multiple addresses -- many organizations do have multiple addresses. Also, according to
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Social Engineering to Take Over Entire TLDs (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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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.
Changes to TLD nameservers need to pass human inspection at the IANA, human inspection at the US Department of Commerce, and human inspection at Verisign (who provide maintenance for the root zone). This is in stark contrast to the largely mechanical process by which domains in gTLD and ccTLD registries are modified.
Requests to change entire NS sets (as opposed to simply dropping a couple and adding a couple of other nameservers) are typically stalled early in the process while the IANA requests justificati
URL (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone else think the URL is hilarious?
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Why do we need registrars? (Score:3, Interesting)
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They will have less money, if they have to support the DNS infrastructure.
Re:Why do we need registrars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Actually I remember when there was only one shop in town and it was free.
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Few old timers around it seems :)
No problem! (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:lastweeksnews (Score:5, Funny)
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.
The quality of Journalism? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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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.
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Well, I would like to hold professional journalists to higher standards.
While I agree that it is a subtle difference, it is a difference I expect a professional word smith (journalist) to pick up and to question its meaning. No degree in CS required, but a critical mind and some sense for the kind of spin that press releases contain.
And I expect for a reporter to report facts and question them and not "for a reporter to assume." If (s)he simply wants to reprint the press release that is fine with me, but te
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Not to talk to myself, but I just also read the "press release" from ICANN. It says the same things "icann.com and iana.com were recently redirected to different DNS servers." How can that be?
The press release also talks about "The domains in question are used only as mirrors for ICANN and IANA's main websites." Well, as of today the domains and the www.... 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 some
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Just to continue talking to myself.
The web server does not seem to be configured well either. If a webmaster cares about search engine visibility (optimization) then (s)he wants to really redirect the aliases for that server to a single normalized domain name. This is not the case with this web server, it responds under http://www.icann.com/ [icann.com], http://icann.com/ [icann.com], http://icann.org/ [icann.org], http://www.icann.org/ [icann.org] and even http://208.77.188.103/ [208.77.188.103]
This leads to duplicate content in the search engines, makes it harder for r
ICANN needs SEO? (Score:2)
I think ICANN are probably do anti-SEO because they are running out of places to store all the money.
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"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?
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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
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Well, may be we need to be that pedantic. My read on what ICANN's press release says is the exact opposite.
The press release says clearly that the http server was not compromised ("The organizations' actual websites at icann.org and iana.org were unaffected. "), but instead the DNS records at the root server were directed to a different DNS server ("The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN's registrar's systems.") who did reply with different IP addresses that did not belong to ICANN and served a
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I'm confused as to what you're confused about. Somebody got icann.com and iana.com to point to different DNS servers which served A records pointing to third-party IP addresses, so that queries for http://www.icann.com/ [icann.com] and http://www.iana.com/ [iana.com] went to a third-party HTTP server which did not return a redirect to ICANN's official web sites (like ICANN's HTTP server would have), but instead returned something else.
I didn't bother to read the article (I'm not new here), but what about this is unclear to you?
Stupid bastiges, serves them right (Score:1)
Talk about a bunch of completely incapable morons ... and we're depending on THEM to keep the Internet running?
Sheesh .. I hope it happens every damned day. In fact I hope someone brings the whole damned thing down. Maybe then the Powers That Be (whoever / whatever THAT is) will replace ICANN top to bottom, clean up the entire domain mess, and give us an honest system.
I noted something similar 14 years ago (Score:2)
Old news (Score:1)