This may be helpful... I use the Domain Monitor at www.domaintools.com & check in on a regular basis to see quickly at-a-glance which domains we own are close to expiration. Losing control of your domain name can be a nightmare - we see this happen frequently to new clients who have had someone else register their domain names for them, or who have forgotten their registrar account info, or simply forget. We've seen cases where domain names have expired & been snapped up by disreputable organizations who offer to "sell back" a domain name for thousands of dollars. We urge our clients to register their own domain names. So a couple of important points: 1. Keep track of your domain names (registration account info and expiration dates). 2. Own your own domain names! We've also seen too many cases where a previous developer registered a domain name for a client - the client loses touch with the developer, or has a falling-out with them, and the developer won't release ownership (in a particularly nasty case of this, the developer pointed to domain name to a competitor's website). Bronwen ______________________ Bronwen Hodgkinson bronwen at cdevision.com 413.532.6100 cdeVision, LLC 4 Open Square Way Studio 205 Holyoke MA 01040 www.cdeVision.com -----Original Message----- From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net [mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of Rich Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:52 AM To: ussailis at shaysnet.com Cc: hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net Subject: Re: [Hidden-tech] Web URL hijack, update A few notes, for reference we are a Tucows RSP (reseller something something). 1) Domains go through a two step (fuzzy plus) expiration process, 30 days to be renewed and then 40 days to be 'redeemed' by the owner - then they are supposed to be released to the open market for reuse. The fuzzy is that some registrars either renew themselves for parking pages (those strange search/advertising pages) OR some how they just get stuck -- NetSol being really good at that. At some point after the official expiration date the registrars are allowed to 'park' a domain and get any revenue they can for the advertising on the parking page. So the net-net what you saw was the parking page from eNom and that is why you were able to recover it so quickly -- a lesson to all - check your domain(s) at least monthly and get a registrar or reseller who works for your interest. 2) Tucows is a registrar directly with one level of resllers, sounds like your case has Enom doing 2 level of reselling 3) I know of no connection of eNom and Tucows and couldn't find one on a quick scan of our Tucows dealer information 4) Whois is in fact a 2 step process however any recent whois client actually does a two step look up starting with the TLD whois manager. Also, I looked up your host IP at the TLD name servers so things had been fixed by the time I looked, or had not propagated to reach all name servers - could have been at either end of the problem. You don't usually see the intermediate step unless you can request a verbose lookup, Our first step looks like this