Blame the domain owner
Thousands of corporate sites in .gb.com, a domain that offers its services as .co.uk alternative, went offline on Saturday in what seems to be a hijacking attack — a legal fight between the registry and its founder.
Everyone trying to access the sites located in .gb.com zone was greeted by a placeholder page bearing the following message:
"You may be here because you have been sold a domain or email service using the gb.com domain that has ceased to work.
You can restore that service swiftly by registering with GB.COM Ltd.
GB.COM Ltd will not provide a service that you have paid others for, unless they have an arrangement with GB.COM Ltd.
If you have already paid for future service and it has ceased then you should contact your supplier."
The registry selling .gb.com names for last seven years was CentralNIC, a company that now also offers back-end support for .brand applications. During the hijacking, however, the domain seemed to belong to some Stephen Dyer, who was CentralNIC's founder originally, but left the company several years ago following its buyout.
It was unclear how Dyer intended to match his new clients with already existing ones, leaving alone the very idea of registry transition taking place in a hijacking manner. However, just recently CentralNIC has regained access to the domain, and all the sites in .gb.com are online again.
Bit-squatting on the rise
A new cyber-threat is on the rise according to Artem Dinaburg's research which is to be presented at DefCon and Black Hat hacker conferences this week.
According to a summary of Dinaburg's research posted at DefCon conference site, the exposed vulnerability is due to RAM chips, which sometimes can malfunction due to heat or radiation and 'flip bits'. As every bit of information in RAM is either 0 or 1, and DNS uses ASCII encoding, a query containing a single 'flipped bit' can lead the user to a very different site. Dinaburg's example is microsoft.com, which turns into mic2osoft.com thanks to just one faulty bit of information. This means that should such vulnerability occur during the query, one could end up on a completely different domain name from that they wanted to visit. This, in turn, can present a threat for users — and for companies whose sites generate a significant amount of traffic.
Dinaburg has also registered and monitored several 'bit-squatting' sites to show that the vulnerability can present a serious threat. "To verify the seriousness of the issue, I bit-squatted several popular domains, and logged all HTTP and DNS traffic. The results were shocking and surprising, ranging from misdirected DNS queries to requests for Windows updates," Dinaburg states. The methods of preventing the threat are still unclear, but Dinaburg hopes to spill light on these during his presentation.
.com still more popular than .co
Flippa, an Internet broker company, has posted some interesting numbers regarding domain sales. Using its own data for 2010 and 2011, Flippa generated some stats regarding the costs of domain names and their popularity as well as price-affecting factors.
It is important to note that Flippa's data is based on their own sales figures, so that's possibly the reason for an unconditional average price for .to domain which is stated to be whooping $50,000. However, when looking at some other — more frequently sold — domains, Flippa provides quite accurate average figures. For example, your average .co sells for $872, while .uk averages at $3256. Speaking about .co, the company states that .com domains have 124% more chances to sell than .co.
Flippa also notes that the domain costs depend directly on the number of characters as well as the presence of hyphens in the name. The domain name no longer than 10 symbols has an average price around $1500, while the name containing 10 to 20 symbols costs less than $1000, and adding 10 more characters decreases the average price to less than $500. The hyphenated domains on average have their costs at around 26% smaller than the domains without hyphens.
The entire infographic can be found here.
