Freelance Logo Designers Website Hacked

In a shocking incident, a cracker misused a deficiency in Gmail to plunder the domain name of DavidAirey.com, a personal website of famous 28-year old graphic designer, David Airey. This website attracts thousands of visitors from across the world.

David Airey came to know about this incident when he was on a holiday tour to India. He learnt from an e-mail that the domain name of his website had been stolen. The hacker sent him an e-mail in which he asked for money to return his domain name.

David said that when he was in India on holiday tour, he received an e-mail on December 15, 2007, from which he came to know that someone had changed his website domain name and was redirecting to a random site. He thought that his domain name had expired and some domain poacher had cracked it up, as reported by Edinburghnews on December 31, 2007.

Then David received an e-mail from an unknown person who called himself Peyam Irvani and asked money for returning his website domain name, but David denied to pay anything to a criminal. Experts said that hacker snapped David's Gmail account and from there he stolen the domain name.

But GoDaady helped David in getting back his website domain name. He was fortunate because the domain was moved to GoDaddy.

David said that stealing of his domain name proved very costly and he suffered loss of around £5000 because most of his customers come through the Internet. His website was the only source of expanding his business but this incident had severely damaged his expansion plans. David got a surprise gift on the Christmas day when hacker, apparently, felt guilty.

The hacker is Napier University graduate. He maintains a blog in which he mentions the difficulties of his business and tells about the online security threat. The hacker sent an e-mail in which he wrote that his girlfriend had read the blog and he would return the website without any ransom.

Research have suggested to website owners not to keep hosted and free e-mail account as whois address. They recommend for pop e-mail address from a domain they own.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/9/2008