Network Solutions Hijacking Unassigned Sub-Domains

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1. chris
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 6:53 pm

   Holy heck this is shocking.

2. Wayne Lambright
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 6:55 pm

   WTF, thats bullshit.

3. Your Daddy
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm

   netsoldoesnt.gotgame.com bastards!

4. ceejayoz
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

   This may have SEO implications, too. It doesn’t return a 404, so Google’s going to treat it as intentional site contents - and they penalise for duplicate content.

5. Jorge Oliveira
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

   Unbelievable is that this kind of schemes keeps showing up and nobody takes action to punish this guys. It’s simply amazing…

6. Dinkar
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:04 pm

   Bastards!

   IMO, all their clients should sue them and ask for huge compensation.

7. Jahbuh Dahut
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:06 pm

   unfreaking-believable, I want to sign up for an account just to be apart of the class-action.

8. Sean
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

   Fuck Network Solutions.

   If there is one company on the internet I would like to see die a painful death, it is them. Everything they do is horrible. I wish people would stop giving them money.

9. Zach Katkin
   

   April 8th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

   Genius! But preposterous! I can’t believe they would high jack sub domains. I haven’t been searching for domains on the major registrars for years for fear of them snapping them up and trying to resell at a premium. This is yet another terrible example of registrars misbehaving.

10. jason
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

    Network Solutions is the antithesis to “GOOD”, yes I mean “EVIL”. Every year they sink deeper into another layer of hell we never imagined.

    NetSol, come on, get with it! The only reason you really exist today is from Legacy aspects - get a real business model and start treating people with respect.

    jason

11. Russ
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:16 pm

    This is a great opportunity for other Domain Registrars! If I were them I’d post a copy of this post on my home page.

    If you have a domain thats hosted by them, I’d switch……that will teach them.

12. Scott Y.
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:18 pm

    That is ONLY if you are using their DNS for your domain, isn’t it? The only reason app.gotgame.com resolves to NetSol’s under construction page is because gotgame.com’s NS points to NetSol. Most registrars point your domain to their under construction pages after a new domain is registered…

    Maybe there is a wildcard record that has not been removed from gotgame.com?

13. Jim McNelis
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

    wow this is some bullshit. i am glad i do not use network solutions.

14. Joseph F.
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

    Sheesh… talk about desparation from a company. It’s about as bad as a company suing to generate revenue.

    This kind of “catch all” A records should be against the rights that you received when you signed up with network solutions. Something tells me you can set a catch all that would stop this junk.

    just my .02

15. whiskey
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

    Isn’t there an HTACCESS trick to avoid this?

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.example\.com [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/1 [R=301,L]

    You would lose however your subdomains unless you create more conditions, and this will only work with Apache (which statistically most of us seem to be using anyways).

    [citation_needed]? http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/3511.htm Over by the fourth post!

    IF this gets tested by those who are using network solutions, please let the rest of us know posting a comment here somewhere!!!

16. lawrence
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:25 pm

    lol - if you realize the opportunity, you’re genius.
    if you didn’t, you spend your time blasting them - but it’s still rather wrong.

17. eric k
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:27 pm

    CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT…. this is total B.S. How funny would it be if someone started a site called networksolutionslawsuit.com and they used it to for their link farms? I hope someone does it.

18. vutt
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:28 pm

    coool,I like the good news

19. Cyrus L
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Scott is correct. This is a function of using NetSol for name servers, not just for domain registration.

20. Rob
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

    Man oh man do I hate Network Solutions. I can’t believe I hate them more now than when I was a customer, but I do. Pure sleaze.

21. Michael VanDeMar
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    Ok, that’s not just uncalled for, that’s room for damages. I can attest to the fact that Google can and will ban websites for too many subdomains too fast, due to the subdomain spam attack back in 2006:

    http://www.seo-scoop.com/2006/.....-all-week/

22. Chris
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    This happened to a popular environmental economics blog that I read that is hosted by Network Solutions. Network Solutions actually had the audacity to charge them $12 to redirect env-econ.net to http://www.env-econ.net. As a result of Network Solution’s shenanigans they got bumped from Google as a result (they were previously the #1 site when searching “environmental economics”) and they lost over half of their traffic.

    http://www.env-econ.net/2008/01/google.html
    http://www.env-econ.net/2008/0.....gle-n.html

23. Scott Y.
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

    After doing a bit of test (against other domains whose DNS are also set to NS97/NS98.WORLDNIC.COM), it appears that there is a wildcard record that returns the SAME IP address as your main domain.

    Now, gotgame.com actually has its main domain hosted on NetSol’s hosting service. app.gotgame.com actually resolves to the same IP address (NetSol’s hosting service), but obviously the vhost on that web server is not configured to handle that host name, so it returns a default placeholder page — which happens to be NetSol’s under construction page.

    Hijacking?! Looks like pretty standard practise from hosting companies. Anyway. At least people here are having fun kicking bashing their most hated companies.

24. Allen Harkleroad
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    Network Solutions is just plain dirty and no one that works there could claim to have morals. If they did they would be lying. I just wonder why people still pay them $35.00+ dollars a year for domain registrations, anyone that does is just burning money. Prestigious my A$$.

25. Tim
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

    Scumbags

26. Shashi Bellamkonda
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:52 pm

    I work for Network Solutions and just wanted to post to say that I have escalated this . I will report back here as soon I have more info.

    Shashi

27. Wayne Lambright
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:53 pm

    #16 Eric, check out http://HelpMeSue.com its a good read.

28. OMG
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

    True story.

    When I was looking up domain names on Sunday April 6th, I saved a bunch of ones that were available to a notepad file, and so I am absolutely certain that the file was last modified April 6th 2008 and contains the name “powerscroll.com”—one of the names I thought I might be interested in. Now when I look it up again, it was registered April 6th! I had only been using two sites to look up names, register.com and bustaname.com so one of them is totally corrupt!

    I’m not sure who to trust now..???!!!

29. Chris
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    @25 The bottom line is you can’t trust any of them. Until ICANN steps in and starts punishing companies that do stuff like this, it’s like the wild west and registrars are going to keep pushing until someone pushes back…

    Right now, no one is pushing back…

30. matthewvb
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    they also have a domain valuation tool which is supposed to tell how much a registered name is worth so you can enter a bid. They had such a messed up algorithms. They said a 6-letter .com site of a french person’s last name, with zero traffic and not even a site up, was worth over $25,000.

31. Neil
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:02 pm

    @23:

    If this is real, at least NetSol is taking a look at blogs (i.e. the comcast post from a few days ago).

32. Ryan
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:03 pm

    GoDaddy is trustworthy.

    NS = Whore

33. obi
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:12 pm

    If they are doing this to your domain, send them a bill. All sub domains are the legal property of the domain holder, not the registrar

    cheers

34. Peter Urban
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:20 pm

    It really shows NS’s character.

    Here is a solution: set a DNS wildcard of all sub domains to your main domain (i.e. *.yourdomain.com) pointing to your website server and make sure that you have an alias set so that your web sever resolves those wildcard calls. Point your domain to the DNS of your provider and do it there if Network Solutions doesn’t let you set wild cards.

    If you are hosting with NS… well I guess then it’s time to quit and go somewhere else ASAP.

35. Michael B
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:24 pm

    I don’t use NS, and never will.

    -Please check out my blog for ways to make money online
    http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com

36. http://www.meetingflex.com/index.html
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:28 pm

    I wonder why they would do such a thingy.

    http://www.meetingflex.com/index.html
    Web Meeting + Chat + User Management

37. eliza
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    All the people talking about how unethical it is to be giving NS your money, seeing as how it’s the spawn of all evil….?

    I’ve been trying to move my domain registration for seven years.

    Seven. Years.

    Every single time, they come up with some new tactic to hold my domain for ransom. This time, it’s setting up “domain protect” as a feature (ha.), then telling me I can’t transfer because the domain is protected. When I go in to change it and take the unasked-for domain protection off the domain? It counts as a change in service, and they make me wait 60 days to transfer. During that 60 days, they just re-set domain protection, effectively rendering me completely powerless to transfer, due to, as they say, the ICANN rules of not letting a domain be transferred within 60 days of an account change.

    I’m two seconds from a bazooka filled with chickens and a trip to their headquarters. I *hate* those people. Every last festering, stinking one of them.

38. brian
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    GoDaddy was doing the same to my subdomains a while back. total bullshit.

39. Mikhail Panchenko
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:43 pm

    This story does not surprise me. However, I am shocked at the number of tabs whoever took that screenshot has open.

40. Jason Coleman
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:46 pm

    I’m guessing that by noon tomorrow, they’ll come out with a statement saying it was some kind of server/programming error.

41. Mike
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:50 pm

    Netsol is owned by General Atlantic Partners
    http://www.generalatlantic.com.....efault.asp

    They own a boatload of net companies. Private equity without a conscience.

    Some junior associate with a stupid idea brought this to the table. He’ll get a big bonus this year.

    Where is ICANN/ WIPO et al?

42. Hendra
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm

    it’s about time for all netsol customers to file a class action and sue it’s ass off and shut it down for good. Jerks!

43. george
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

    Well lately Roadrunner which is time warner’s cable internet provider now does hijacked domain style results pages with ads if you type a domain into the search bar and it doesn’t resolve.

    So clearly they must be intercepting your search and paying enough attention to it to see if it resolves and then making money on putting up a page with ad links if it doesn’t.

44. Jon
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

    Netsol is already an irrelevant company… it’s just a matter of time before others realize this and dump them for any of their hosting or domain related services!

    Jon
    http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories!

45. matt
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:13 pm

    If your domain is using the NS nameserver, add a wildcard “A” record so any subdomain will resolve to your website. *.domain.com

    or stop using NS <- better solution

46. PressReleasePoint
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    I noticed this with a similar domain hosting service provider answerable.com They are doing this for years.

47. geomark
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    It’s amazing watching these sleaze bags self destruct with one stupid stunt after another.

48. AnonTroll
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

    I think this is just a case of DNS misconfiguration. No one bothered to check before publishing, though, am I right?

49. gregory
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 10:24 pm

    this is cool…

    “I’m two seconds from a bazooka filled with chickens and a trip to their headquarters.”

50. arterberry
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    Is that legal? If you have a trademarked company name tied to your URL, can a company - especially a hosting company - just tag a sub-domain to what is legally yours??? This is starting to sound like a potential class law suit action in the the making. There must be some caveat in Network Solutions legalese and terms of service…but that small print is straight sh*t.

51. DOT-LA Supporter
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 11:18 pm

    Great blog and definitely an important issue. I’m curious why TechCrunch hasn’t also stepped up to the plate and asked why Google runs a website at http://www.google.la as being for the country of Laos when this domain space has been licensed by LA Names Corporation since 2003 for the City of Los Angeles. Visit http://www.www.la for additional information. Google is intentionally trying to mislead the public by including the country name of Laos on its DOT-LA website and that’s okay. This issue has been mentioned on TechCrunch several times in various related blogs, however, I guess this isn’t important enough for TechCrunch to pursue…

52. jake
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

    This is not looking good for this company.

53. Sergey Rusak
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 11:27 pm

    I made little investigation and found:

    All links from this sub-domain lead to kolmic.com network which is not indexed by Google (banned?).
    From November 2007 Kolmic traffic boosted to Top 1000 Alexa:
    http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....kolmic.com

54. ineedhits Australia
    

    April 8th, 2008 at 11:58 pm

    You’d think with all the questionable things this company is doing they would have no users left.

55. Joel Strellner
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 12:10 am

    Does anyone remember when Verisign did the exact same thing to all unregistered domains on the internet? A coincidence? Now that you know about the sub domain hijacking, do you think it is a coincidence? If you do think its a coincidence, do you remember that Verisign once fully owned Network Solutions and still owns 15 percent of the company today. Coincidence? I think not.

    Both of these companies are shady, but unfortunately because Verisign maintains the registry and global DNS service they are entitled to a $6.00 commission for every single .com and .net domain; which effectively means that they’ll never go out of business. Since they’ll never go out of business I doubt that Network Solutions will either.

    Oh, and thanks to Verisign, every .com and .net domain registration will go up about $0.42 this year because of their greed.

    See this article about it: http://sedo.com/links/showhtml.php3?Id=1687

    I really, really hate these two companies. I know better, but I still wish both of them would die a horrible business death. You know, like getting sued for so much that they have to shut their doors to pay the settlement. That would be nice.

56. Aaron Stannard
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 12:33 am

    This is exactly why I switched from Network Solutions to GoDaddy; GoDaddy’s got great customer service and they don’t try and rob me at gunpoint by hijacking my own domain name and threatening my brand.

57. DC Crowley
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 12:36 am

    What a total low life! Network solutions and Verisign - I’ll never do business with you guys

58. Jon Gilkison
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 2:57 am

    You just need to put a wildcard record in the DNS management. That’s like the second thing you do with almost any registrar you let handle your DNS.

    Not sure what the issue is?

59. Joop
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 5:20 am

    Bunch of thieves.. I have had some bad experiences with them as well. Including their http://www.namejet.com

60. Oskars Rumpeters
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 6:10 am

    Wow! I don’t understand why somebody still uses their services???

61. Chess
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 6:27 am

    So you have a competitor site using Network Solutions? Simply submit tons of non-existent sub-domains that bring up these Network Solutions holder pages to Google as new sites and watch as thier entire domain drops out of Google Search results!

62. EJ Fox
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 6:54 am

    I noticed this only just yesterday- instead of going to http://www.census.gov I went to http://census.gov/

    Which goes to the page you mention.

    For some reason it bothers me more that it does this to some government agency.

63. JC
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 7:47 am

    These guys need to get sued.

64. Casey
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 7:47 am

    I can confirm this is happening for reaganta.com - check out asdfasdfasdf.reaganta.com

65. D.L.
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 8:03 am

    My domains don’t have this problem. It may be one of those things people opted into without reading carefully.

66. David
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 8:27 am

    Wow! I don’t understand why somebody still uses their services???

    Well, why do some people still use Go Daddy despite their fare share of haters?

    Folks, Shashi offered to check this out. Wait ’til then.

67. Victor Caballero
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 8:45 am

    So Netsol should be paying us to register domains! What a bold move on their part.

    I wonder how they decided to do this.

    I’m sure there will be an investigation of some sort. NetSol just seems to do whatever they want.

    I used then when it was the only game in town many many years ago. Now, why would you!

68. jro
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 8:49 am

    Duncan - can you please update your post to let everyone know the fix?

    @34 (Peter) has the right solution — use a wildcard entry so any/all domain requests go to your web server.

    This will help when others start googling this and are looking for the fix.

69. zigzag
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Man, what a bunch of kooks. I agree with #66, pay us to register our own sub-domains!

70. Teddy
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Come on, people. Network Solutions is big and slow and probably the LAST registrar to do this - not the first.

    Call it evil if you like, but every registrar does this. GoDaddy has been doing it for much longer than these guys. If you don’t want your domains pointed to their parked pages, THERE IS A CHECKBOX in the Network Solutions account manager!

    I’ve never known a company that inspires more misdirected passion than Network Solutions.

71. Mark
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am

    Wow, I really didn’t think NetSol could get any worse… they truly are world-class scumbags!

72. Michael
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 11:20 am

    This guy set up a wildcard CNAME, but didn’t set up anything for it to point to, so of course network solutions is showing the same parked page they would for any parked domain without a page.

73. MikeK
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

    GETS WORSE: I did a WHOIS search at netsol only to find two days later that they had “registered” the domain I searched and found available. So the only way to register it was through Network Solutions. Try it, you’ll see. IUse netsol’s WHOIS, if the domain your search is available and passes some possible netsol filter it’ll get registered by netsol.

74. David
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm

    I’ve never known a company that inspires more misdirected passion than Network Solutions.

    That’s the way it is, Teddy, especially if some people don’t fully understand or even care about the devil in the details. And probably various, if not all, registrars do that when the domain name’s using their DNS.

    The one in question here appears to be using Network Solutions’ hosting aside from their DNS. I can’t seem to find any CNAME records unless someone else can, nor can I find any A records pointing the domain name to another IP address other than the registrar’s.

75. Shashi Bellamkonda
    

    April 9th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

    Hi,

    Just posting to let you know that this was brought to attention of the executive management and the issue should be addressed now.

    Sorry for posting so late but didn’t have a chance to get to a computer till now as I am on vacation .

    Shashi

76. Amit Gupta
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 1:42 am

    Its no longer showing ads page & is returning a 404 page instead. Guess NetSol was trying if that ad thing would work out, eh!

77. Brendon Jones
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 2:02 am

    Network Solutions also hijack unassigned domains. WARNING: Do not use Network Solutions to search for a domain that you are interested in acquiring. They will hijack it and you will be unable to use another registration services such as GoDaddy to register it.

78. Sarah
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 5:13 am

    I am loving this “move to another provider” stuff… I, like a previous poster, have been trying to change to another provider for 4 years. We have business critical domains registered with them back in the late 90s before I joined the company. Because the individual who registered the domains on behalf of the company left 10 years ago and cannot personally authorise the transfer, even though he was simply the contact name given for the NS account and not the domains, NS refuse to allow me access to the account. They even changed the Whois data for the domain names to remove reference to the company name so that the domains now legally stand in the name of the ex-employee. The fact that all the contact details are 10 years out of date breaches their own terms and conditions and effectively ensures that no transfer away is possible. The only word for this is “criminal”.

79. Dan Wegner
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 7:23 am

    There’s this mentality that uncharted legal territory is the Wild West with no rules whatsoever. This is a serious legal and business error. Reasonable effort must be made to be both ethical and moral. This is clearly theft or if there’s some sneaky language in the EUA then I’d say it’s fraud and in the weakest case it would be some sort of diminishment of brand or reputation, posting all those competitors ads. The general public is too internet savvy to have this go public without an outcry. If it goes public, heads will roll.

80. Biju
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 7:58 am

    I had stopped using their service after getting a bad experience. Anyways a good option for registrar to make some extra money.

81. Shashi Bellamkonda
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 8:50 am

    #78 Sarah,

    Please send me an email and we can sort this out. My email is shashib at networksolutions.com. Most systems we have are usually to safeguard the domain registrants.

    Shashi

82. David
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    Its no longer showing ads page & is returning a 404 page instead. Guess NetSol was trying if that ad thing would work out, eh!

    Maybe, Amit. Then it’s also possible someone at the registrant’s end pulled a DNS fast one on them.

    Also no longer pointing to any page whatever you type in before gotgame, so everything looks okay. Time to move along, folks, unless you insist on making an issue that might not necessarily be Network Solutions’ doing without being able to check further.

83. Jay
    

    April 10th, 2008 at 9:51 pm

    Fuck Network Solutions

84. Hanspeter
    

    April 11th, 2008 at 9:19 am

    A NetSol added 404 is still no good. It indicates that something ‘exists’ at that location when in reality the domain owner has never put something there.

85. offpoint
    

    April 11th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    now this is interesting.. no longer repro, just as what 82 said

86. bobs
    

    April 13th, 2008 at 11:25 pm

    Really, great information there. Last month I have faced new problem to all my domains. On every index pages and login pages, there are iframe codes which lead to IP address. I removed code from my websites manually and changed all ftp passwords. Since then its ok.

87. Claude Gelinas
    

    April 14th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

    Thank you very much for bringing this information to our attention.

    I left NetSol a long time ago, when they charged 100$ a year for a domain name… and I’m never going back, ever.

88. Suzanne
    

    April 17th, 2008 at 9:29 am

    Network Solutions is preventing me from accessing Maria Sharapova’s official website ! … I can find no way of getting round it or accessing http://www.mariasharapova.com. without their page popping up. …

    What’s more, once the Network Solutions page is up on my screen, nothing will get rid of it. It just refuses to close. …

    As a total tech retard, this is completely beyond me. .. Is there anything at all I can do to get back to the tennis ???

    Incidentally, I’ve never, to my knowledge, had anything to do with this company. Don’t know one end of a website from another .. so their offering me the Sharapova website domain name is very sweet of them, I’m sure, but I sort of think it already belongs to Sharapova’s team ! lol

89. MS Domains Geek
    

    April 20th, 2008 at 11:54 pm

    Netsol’s tactics get even worse. When using a whois or “find a domain” on their site, they track the IP that the query came from and resolve it to a company. If the company is big enough (like microsoft), then they will reserve the queried domain, and jack up their price to acquire it. Then they’ll solicit whomever did the query with their price-gouging. Corporate Cyber-squatting.

90. IP
    

    April 28th, 2008 at 1:29 am

    Netsol doing such cheap hijacking business. They don’t do business in transparent way.

91. Jennifer
    

    May 2nd, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Regsiter.com also does this:

    http://info.poets.net/

    poets.net is an active website, and I DON’T appreciate this BS. It even has a popup!