Daily Domainer

This is a follow-up to last night's post. According to heise.de, google.de was indeed hijacked by a client of the German web hosting company goneo.de. The client had claimed to Goneo that he was the owner of google.de, and Goneo had automatically passed on the claim to the .de registry DeNIC. In accordance with DeNIC policies, the registry sent emails to Google's domain registrar MarkMonitor to confirm if they had any objections to the ownership transfer. MarkMonitor failed to respond to the inquiry within the required time limit, which DeNIC (in accordance with its flawed transfer policies) interpreted as approval.

When Goneo realized what had happened and that google.de was resolving to their server, they immediately authorized DeNIC to transfer the domain back to Google. But during that process it appears that DeNIC briefly dropped google.de, which led to its immediate registration by Fresh Domains, a German drop catching firm.

Google.de is now back under Google's ownership. This chain of events has been confirmed by Goneo and DeNIC, but not by Google or MarkMonitor. DeNIC says that Goneo is to blame, but Goneo claims they are not responsible because "nobody looks at these automated transfer requests anyway". DeNIC could not explain how the domain eventually ended up in the hands of drop catching firm Fresh Domains. There is only one way this could have happened, though. DeNIC must have briefly dropped google.de when trying to transfer the domain back to Google.

As for MarkMonitor, they didn't respond to requests for comment. It appears that Google did nothing wrong (other than registering their domain at MarkMonitor) because in accordance with the flawed DeNIC transfer policies they were never asked whether they wanted to give up their domain.

It is possible that the DeNIC registry will soon introduce an optional LOCK status as well as AUTH codes for all .de domains to prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future. (An AUTH code is basically a password for a domain which ensures that only the actual owner can transfer the domain.)

Update: The following "confession email" was received by The Register:

Hello Chris, I am the person in question registering the domain with Goneo, although it did happen inadvertently. I showed my girlfriend how one of my domains had been taken over by somebody else with the Goneo ordering system - but before entering my contact details, I went back in the ordering process and registered a different domain. Somehow, the Goneo system must have received both domains to register…

Greetings,

- The accidental few-hours owner of google.de