João Almeida from Brazil suddenly lost his TabelaFipeBrasil.com website. He founded it in 2013 to track car prices in Brazil. But some time ago he discovered that he could not access his own site as its administrator.
According to Domain Name Wire, an unknown attacker managed to steal the TabelaFipeBrasil.com domain name and transfer it to another registrar company. Most likely, Almeida’s account was hacked or his domain registrar was hit by a hacker attack. Almeida alleges that the purpose of the theft was to generate advertising revenue from the site. The revenue can add up to quite a pretty penny, considering that the site is very popular in Brazil: in the last month alone, it had 2.5 million views. The Google AdSense code on the site was changed shortly after the theft, which supports Almeida’s claim.
Almeida is determined to regain the domain and site. He hired Wiley Rein LLP, one of the largest law firms in Washington, to represent his interests. The lawsuit was filed in Virginia, where Verisign, the .COM domain zone registry, is based. Domain names are stolen quite often. For example, the SVH.com domain, owned by Sonoma Valley Hospital in California, was recently hijacked. However, in this case, the attackers were interested not in the hospital’s website but in the domain itself: three-letter names in the .COM zone can be worth tens of thousands of dollars.
