This article was published 16 years ago
Internet

ICANN loses control of domain name

If you were an organization that issues domain names and you lose control of your domain name, how would you try and spin this embarrassment?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said it happened on June 26 when an internet registration company it oversees got fooled into transferring the domain names to someone else.

ICANN issued a statement saying a problem occurred when the DNS addresses were changed to another address under an apparent DNS attack.

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.

The domains in question are used only as mirrors for ICANN and IANA’s main websites. The organizations’ actual websites at icann.org and iana.org were unaffected.

The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN’s registrar’s systems. A full, confidential, security report from that registrar has since been provided to ICANN with respect to this attack.

We hear several stories of websites’ DNS records being changed under the attack. Now that ICANN has become the latest victim of a DNS attack, could we see changes in the way DNS records are changed?