Don`t Lose Your Domain to Hijackers! - Ways to Protect Yourself
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How can you prevent this from happening to you? There are a number of things you can do. Most of these involve maintaining a certain level of control over your information and who has access to it. It’s going to require some extra care on your part, but then again, isn’t your online business worth it?
Let’s start with your domain account information. Make sure you list your own name for the administrative contact, and use your full name. The administrative contact is the first one registrars try to reach in case of domain transfers. Whenever information in your whois account changes (i.e. you move, change your phone number, change your email account) be sure to update it promptly.
Now let’s look at email addresses. Use one in your whois information that doesn’t belong to the domain it’s for; in short, if the domain is www.mystore.com, the email listed should NOT be me@mystore.com. It also shouldn’t be a free email address such as the ones you can get from Hotmail or Yahoo. Hijackers target those, and once they get in, you might not be able to get your account back very quickly, which will give them plenty of time to make the transfer. In any case, you should make sure you check that email address at least once a day.
Now let’s talk passwords. The password for the email address mentioned above should be complex so it can’t be easily broken. Microsoft has a password checker which you can use to check the strength of your password. The password for your domain name account should also be strong. And you should change both passwords periodically.
Incidentally, lots of people feel that they must write down their passwords. While this is a bad practice, if you really need to write it down, keep your domain login name, account number, and password in one place, where only you and other trusted people can reach it.
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