United Domains gets Punk’d
Members of ICANN community and competing domain registrars find themselves as fresh United Domains account holders.
Someone is having a laugh at United Domains’ expense.
Over the past few days an unknown perpetrator has set up roughly 500 empty accounts at domain name registrar United Domains using email addresses of people active in ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and at various competing domain name registrars. Each of these people received a welcome email from the registrar.
The firm sent an email this morning to people who had their email address used to set up an account.
As stated by Kate Hutchinson, Marketing Manager for United Domains, the perpetrator does not appear to have had sinister plans.
“Someone thought it would be fun,” she stated. It does not appear to be related to identity theft and all of the email addresses that were used are easily found online.
The slogan at the top of United Domains’ web site reads “Domain Name Registration made simple!”. Part of that simplicity is that anyone can create an account easily. Perhaps too easily.
“We are making some changes to how you can create an account that will require a higher level of accountability,” Hutchinson stated.
