 Panix hijack: more details
posted by tbyfield on Monday January 17 2005, @11:29AM
Panix, New York City's oldest ISP and my own beloved provider, fell victim to a domain-name hijacking over the (long in the US) weekend. It isn't clear how precisely this happened, and the situation has since been resolved, allowing for DNS propagation issues. But Panix, which normally is the model of transparency, has clammed up, in part perhaps because (to quote a Panix MOTD) the incidents "involved multiple felonies here and abroad [and m]any members of law enforcement agencies in the US and at least three other countries have already been involved."
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According to comments by Slashdot user "tjls", who almost certainly is a familiar voice to old net-heads (from his contributions to BSD development no less than his role as Panix's former security maven):
What seems to have happened is that somehow the Australian registrar "melbourneIT.com" yanked the fully paid-up registration away from Dotster (where Panix had it) without any notice whatsoever (this violates all the relevant RFCs for the Shared Registration System and the current ICANN policy *and* seems to indicate a severe bug or security problem somewhere in the registration system).
"tjls" goes into greater detail about the transfer process here.
Discussion of the event—on Slashdot, on NANOG, and elsewhere—is vexed: the received wisdom is that hijackings of this kind happen more than occasionally, that the way to prevent them is to "registrar-lock" domains, and (or, more accurately, but) that Panix had in fact registrar-locked its domains (see, for example, Sue Crawford's article on CircleID). Upshot: the shared registration system has holes.
It's tempting for me to "insert de rigeur critique of ICANN here," just as it would no doubt be tempting to readers to sigh "there are those ICANN-watchers going off on ICANN again." Here's the bottom line: Panix is a very, very savvy ISP which, as they themselves say on their front page, "takes an active role in protecting free speech and privacy on the Internet, and in improving Internet security." It's also famous for firsts, among them being the first high-profile victim of a "SYN flood" attack in September 1996, which foreshadowed the rise of DDoS attacks since then. Any organization that makes the kinds of claims that ICANN does about its realm of responsibility would do well to take this hijacking as a warning, because the implications—if it involved, say, Paypal or
Bank of America—could be quite severe. Maybe that's why law enforcement agencies at least four countries are so interested in the kind of incident they could so easily write off: something bad happening to a small, local, private ISP with a paltry few tens of thousands of users.
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< Panix's domain name Hijacked
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