In an update to the theft of Perl.com, Brian D Foy tells us the whole story, The Hijacking of Perl.com, and the What we think happened section is very enlightening: “This part veers into some speculation, and Perl.com wasn’t the only victim. We think that there was a social engineering attack on Network Solutions, including phony documents and so on. There’s no reason for Network Solutions to reveal anything to me (again, I’m not the injured party), but I did talk to other domain owners involved and this is the basic scheme they reported.” Definitely dig into the article, and don’t forget Some lessons where we get some solid advice, “Features such as two-factor authentication probably would have saved us much of this trouble (although social engineering attacks tend to route around safeguards).”

My original post is below.

We’ve seen many domain names hijacked over the years, Google, Microsoft, and the insane story of sex.com (heck the Vice story about sex.com is just a teaser to an entire book about the issue), and last week we got an open source domain owned by the Perl Foundation stolen, BleepingComputer, Perl.com domain stolen, now using IP address tied to malware: “On the 28th, d foy tweeted that they have set up perl.com temporarily at http://perldotcom.perl.org for users who wish to access the site until the domain is recovered.”

This sucks because open source has enough battles to fight with limited resources. It’s also an important reminder to Lock Your Domain and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible.