1.8: How to Protect Your Domain Names From Being Stolen

Today’s episode is brought to you by my friends at siteground. Use my affiliate link: https://www.siteground.com/go/jasonofflorida Segment 1: What is Domain Name Theft and How are Domain Names Stolen? Most common way: Hacker finds out what your login to your domain registrar by doing a whois lookup for your domain name. If it’s an email that can be logged into online (such as gmail or outlook or some other hosted email account), hackers will try to break into your email account. Once they have access they will change your email password, locking you out. Once they gain access to your email, they can use “forget password” on your domain registrar login and have access to your domain registrar. They will now change the password to your registrar account, effectively locking you out. Now all they have to do is transfer your domains to another account. Segment 2: how to prevent your domain names from being stolen A few years ago, the dev shop I work at during the day did the dev work to allow users to opt-into two-factor authentication, so I have a strong working knowledge of how it works.  I’m going to share my knowledge today to help you keep your domain names from being compromised. Online security is about setting up multiple lines of defense around all of your accounts.  It’s not a matter of IF one of your accounts will be compromised, but WHEN.  Because of that, it’s important to have layers of security. Length is truly the only thing that matters. Use a password manager, like LastPass, to generate and store your passwords. Use UNIQUE passwords everywhere you login. Never reuse a password you use! Always Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) Use different email addresses as your contacts for than you use to login with your registrar account. Lock your domain names. Your registrar allows you to set a “lock” on your domain – this means they will have to contact you via your contact info to unlock your domain to enable a transfer. Finally, I want to reiterate that you should NEVER use a website that doesn’t offer TOTP. Segment 3: SOME OF MY LANDING PAGES HOSTED THROUGH EFTY.COM RECENTLY STOPPED WORKING I wrote in this article how to setup email forwarding on your domains.  In it, I showed you how to setup your efty.com landers without pointing your DNS servers to efty.com.  It seems as though efty has closed this loophole.  Earlier this week, I notice my landers setup with domain forwarding with masking no longer worked, so I had to route my DNS through efty.com to get them to work again.  It’s a minor inconvenience, and since each registrar handles email forwarding differently (paid vs free) and sometimes it works or it doesn’t (I’m looking at you GoDaddy), then it’s even more difficult to bulk forward email sent to email addresses associated with your domain.  I’ll be writing an article on this soon (hopefully)