Domain investor Mike O’Connor announced he would put one of his domains, corp.com, up for auction. O’Connor is a pioneer of domain investment: he started registering domains back in 1994 and created an excellent collection, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. However, the news that he will auction corp.com was a real bombshell, and the reason for this is quite frightening.
This domain is one of the few with a problem known as “namespace collision,” a situation where domain names intended to be used exclusively on an internal company network end up overlapping with domains that can resolve normally on the open internet. Some time ago Microsoft designed Active Directory, which made it much easier for users to identify themselves in internal networks. Its first versions used corp as the default Active Directory address. Back then, it wasn’t much of a problem: internal company networks consisted entirely of bulky desktop computers, which were difficult to remove from the office and connect to a different network. However, today anyone can easily leave the office carrying a corporate laptop: for example, to have a coffee in the coffee shop next door, while a lot of the laptop’s internal processes will take their necessary resources from the internal network, redirected to corp.com via the wi-fi connection at the coffee shop, according to a famous cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs.
Microsoft tried to remedy situation by issuing several software updates and recommending that all corporate users change the Active Directory address from the default one, corp, to a second-level domain that the organization actually owns. However, not everyone followed the advice, perhaps because such modifications involve shutting down the entire corporate network, probably for a long time. Last year, JAS Global Advisors carried out an eight-month-long research project on namespace collisions and found out, in particular, that more than 375,000 Windows PCs were trying to send corp.com various pieces of information, including logins and passwords, confidential data, financial reports and a lot of other information from many large companies. And when JAS Global Advisors temporarily configured corp.com to accept incoming email, with the owner’s permission, they received in excess of 12 million emails in one hour and then urgently discontinued the experiment.
It is easy to see that if, after being put on auction, corp.com is snatched by unscrupulous owners, it will serve as a most effective tool for various cybercrimes. Mike O’Connor said he was selling the domain because he wanted to withdraw from business and he didn’t want his children to be responsible for corp.com. He said he was hoping that Microsoft would buy the domain. The company tried to do this at one point, offering $20,000, which the owner considered totally inadequate. It was also suggested that O’Connor should just give corp.com to Microsoft as an altruistic gesture, but the investor refused: he believes the software giant ought to be accountable for its products and mistakes. O’Connor stressed that he didn’t need money, but the starting price for corp.com is $1.7 million.
