How To Protect Your Domain From Hijacking |
Posted: April 5, 2017 |
Introduction and History It goes without saying that your customers are highly reliant on your website in order to interact with your business. That said, your domain names and your websites are an integral part of your business because without it, a huge part of the accessibility to your business is cut off. The importance of these online assets highlight the needs to have do a domain check on your websites and domain names to keep it away from any online attacks to your business. A domain check on the security aspects will help protect it from hackers that are rampant in attacking domain name registries and registrars. Many corporations and businesses are caught up with acquiring these domain names that they forget to do a domain check on the secureness of these domains. Why isn’t the security of these domain names becoming a priority for businesses worldwide? This article will outline several reasons why domain checks are important.
What risks do you face? The risks that you face when you do not do domain checks includes putting your domains at risk to attacks by hackers and scammers. With the abundance of resources online, these hackers are getting smarter by the day as they all have different methods to acquire profit from hacking and hijacking domains. In 2011, a European based registrar was attacked using a simple technique called the SQL injection,a method which allows the hackers to modify the nameserver settings on several domains. The sooner you realize the importance of your domains to your business, the faster you must do a domain check. There are many fraudsters out there with bad motivations to ruin your reputation. Domain Name Hijacking Not doing a domain check will also expose you to the risk of domain name hijacking. This is a more targeted manner of attack whereby the scammer will try to access your login details by making unauthorised domain transfers. There are plenty of automated domain registrars that may overlook this and may mistakenly allow unauthorised access to fraudulent individuals. A domain check will help you to reduce the risk of your online websites from being attacked. If you are lucky, you may be able to regain access to these domain names but the damages done during the acquisition of these domain names by pointing to a different server may severely damage your reputation. In 2014, Sony’s systems were hacked enabling information such as names, addresses, internal emails and other personal information of over 47,000 employees to be leaked to the public. With this data, there are so much harms that these hackers can do. Below are a few domain checks that you need to ensure you have in place when you are running an online business.
What steps can you take to mitigate the risks?
Maintain your portfolio of domains The first step towards a domain check for the security of your domains is ensuring that you have a global and centralized view of all your domain names. Keep records of your domain portfolio. This is a form of domain check that you need to ensure you keep track of. If you own a larger corporation, ensure that you have a department with the task of constantly keeping track of these domains by doing domain checks to ensure the security of these domains are not compromised. Ensure you have a trustworthy domain registrar The next step in your domain check includes ensuring that you have invested in a good quality domain registrar. Before you invest in any domain registrar, make sure that you understand what are the steps that they are taking to ensure that the security of your domain is constantly kept at a high level. Your domain check should include whether these registrars have a proven track record of ensuring the security of these customers domains are kept very high. These domain registrars that you need to look for are those that are constantly on high alert for any potential attacks and continues to innovate their system for improved security.
Consider Registrar Locking Another important step in doing your domain check is implementing the registrar locking. This is a mechanism with another alternate name which is “registrar lock”. Essentially, this domain check step is a method whereby all domain configurations for the domains are frozen until there is permission from the domain registrar to unlock them. Usually, this can only be done through a protocol that is exclusive to the customer. This domain check offers you a form of security whereby there are steps that needs to be taken according to specific protocols pertaining specific customers. These are absolutely vital in your domain check because passing these domain checks are what deters a persistent hijacker from continuously trying to attack your domains.
Do you want to be the next business getting domain hijacked? In early 2014, a well known group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hacked Skype social media accounts. Information which could potentially compromise the safety of many individuals and the matter of a nation’s integrity was leaked. The information which was leaked claimed that the US National Security Agency surveillance program had access to the servers of Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple. These critical information were leaked just simply by a group of irresponsible individuals. The question that you need to ask yourself is if you will be able to mitigate the damages caused by the downtime of your website or the leak of important information. Do a quick domain check today. Make sure that your domain registrars are locked. Educate yourself on how you can react upon any attacks by an online entities.
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