Panix Domain Hijacked

By WebProNews
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2005-01-17

Panix, an Internet service provider for the New York area, was the victim of a domain hijacking this past weekend. The attack has put the ISP in a recovery mode as they effort to restore the domain back to normal.

According to The Register, the domain's ownership was moved to a company in Australia, while the company's DNS was relocated to the United Kingdom. Panix' email was also redirected to a location in Canada.

"By Sunday, Panix had recovered its Panix.com domain from Australian domain hosting / registration firm Melbourne IT, where the purloined domain was parked, back to its natural home at Dotster. Root servera have already been updated but the distributed nature of the net's Domain Name System means that it will take up to 24 hours before normality is restored fully.

Domain transfer rules that came into effect last November mean that inter-registry transfer requests are automatically approved after five days unless countermanded by the owner of the domain. Panix, established in 1989 and New York's oldest commercial ISPs, apparently fell foul of these rules."

A note that appears on Panix.com homepage details the recovery process:

Recovery from the panix.com domain name hijack is underway. The registrar in Melbourne has reverted the domain back to us, and the global Internet registry and domain name servers are now showing the correct information.

However, due to the distributed nature of the Internet domain name system, it will take 4-24 more hours before the false data from the hijacking expires and is discarded by the various name servers. Our customers and servers can be reached by using the panix.net domain, as described below.

Please visit Panix.com for more information.

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