QUESTION: One of our commercial customer's employees clicked over to the company's Web site the other day and discovered that it was no longer the company's Web site. It had been taken over by a porno company and it featured a teaser for a live cam with a young woman with few clothes on. It turned out the company had inadvertently let its domain name expire and someone else had purchased it. That really got us to thinking around here. What steps should we be taking to avoid being similarly victimized?
ANSWER: Whoever is in charge of the Web site needs to immediately go to whois.net and find out when your domain name is set to expire. It should be calendared. Note who the various contacts are that are listed with Verisign/Network Solutions and make sure they are accurate. Consider renewing your domain name registration for the longest period of time.
Also, if you feature links to third party Web sites, constantly monitor those links for changes, because you could be linking inadvertently to something your customers wouldn't appreciate. One local company, for example, had originally bought each variation of its domain name -- .net, .com, and .org. The guy who originally handled the registrations left the company and, in a cost-saving measure, his successors decided to only renew the .com domain. The others were bought by companies that ran Adult sites. It ended up in the local news when a user who had bookmarked the company's old .net site went back to visit and got a big shock. The only way to guard against this in third-party links you maintain is through a periodic manual link review.
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