Hijacking of Panix.com: A Call for An Emergency Rollback Procedure
Consider this - an ISP, one of the oldest on the Internet, has a valuable domain name known world-wide. They "lock down" said domain name, in accordance with ICANN registrar rules, which supposedly requires several steps with verification procedures, in order to transfer the domain. Despite this, the domain was transferred; hijacked, in fact, to Melbourne IT. Of course, this took all panix users off the Internet, and all of their email went somewhere besides their in boxes.
The fallout from this action is going to be quite interesting. Some ISPs are talking about just pointing their DNS to reflect the correct information (a la pre-hijacking). Of course, this would effectively cut the registry, Verisign's stranglehold on the root zones. Granted, not all of the servers that get their information solely from Verisign would reflect the pre-hijacked state, but enough would to make a significant difference. This, of course, would be an end-run around ICANN AND Verisign. Definitely an interesting concept.
So think of this next time we have yet another debate on Internet governance, and who gets to "run" the Internet. The answers is now the same as it ever was - the ISPs.
From circleid.com
There's a thread on NANOG to the effect that Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked from Dotster over to MelbourneIT and it has pretty well taken panix.com and its customers offline. Looks like this may be among the first high-profile unauthorized transfer under the new transfer policy. It begs the question, despite the existence of the dispute policy under the new system, what provisions should there be for a situation like... [CircleID]