fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

One of the simplest, fastest and most devastating methods of Black SEO (aka Negative SEO) is the – criminal – act of hijacking a competitor’s domain and transferring it to some other registrar.

Even if the domain should be retrieved by the rightful owner at some later point after expending lots of red tape and exertion (and, most probably, after having paid and arm and a leg in legal fees), the damage caused may well be irreparable.

While that’s really nothing new, domain hijacking having been around for many years, there’s a new twist to it now in that there’s actually a service (possibly several?) propagating e-mail account cracks on platforms such as Yahoo!, MSN, Gmail, and lots of others including university mailboxes:

Hirehacker will find any EMAIL ACCOUNT password for you. The list includes Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Gmail, Rediffmail, Lycos, AIM, Tiscali , Libero, Mac, Netscape and over 600 more domains. They also retrieve password for ALL company mail accounts and university mailboxes.

Sahar Sahid of TH∙E CON∙CEP’TU∙AL∙IST blog reports on this in his piece Hijack A Domain For 200$.

And no, we won’t link to the site in question, and for various reasons, too:

For one, if genuine, it’s a criminal operation we don’t condone and won’t become accessories to.

Second, it might simply be a scam. (For anyone toying with the thought of signing up for their service, don’t! Just figure trying to sue them for non-fulfillment if they do happen to rip you off. Or if they should decide to throw in a little bit of blackmail pressure later on…)

Third, it could just as well be a sting or troll setup. (Many law enforcement agencies have been know for pulling off even dirtier tricks.)

Finally, it’s not too unlikely that it’s one of the more ingenious phishing schemes currently inundating the Web.

Sahar offers some tips on how to prevent losing your own domains to such scumbags, following up:

If domains are your business, if your domains are valuable to you, don’t overlook the very basics – their safety.

Hard to argue witht that.

Subscribe Feed!