What Does it Mean When Your Website’s Registrar is Hacked?

On October 16 Web.com, Networksolutions.com, and register.com had a breach, and as of Nov2nd there is no mention of anything like a breach on their website (web.com owns the others)

The breach information was obtained from the always useful Krebsonsecurity.com site.

 

So what happens when your website’s registrar was hacked? It likely means all of your personal information that you entered into the registrar is now in the hacker’s hands.

What else can happen?

Depending on how bad the breach was(how much the hackers stole) passwords could have been stolen. This is why one should change passwords periodically anyway, but especially after a breach at your registrar.

So if the hackers get sneaky, they can redirect your website to other servers and take over your webtraffic. What could happen then is that anyone trying to access your website could get malware and then get hacked. It is a possibility in this scenario to get some liability for hacking your customers inadvertently.  This is the case in any hacker scenario.

Let’s say due to errors and misconfigurations your website was hacked by the bad guys(not just a registrar error), now the bad guys set up your website to have hidden downloads for all of the people that visit it.  each one of these downloads is actually malware that installs ransomware. So now your clients and potential clients are being infected by your website.  If your client can point to your site and say that is where I got my ransomware – you could be liable!!

So a potential hack on your website has a high impact. And thus it is important to review and make sure it is in good shape all the time. It is not enough to just making sure the server is up. The website has to be unaltered.

 

Contact us to discuss this subject further.

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