Name.Com, one of the most popular web hosting and domain name registrar companies based in United States, fell victim of cyber hacking by the hackers’ group known as Hack the Planet. The incident took place at the beginning of May this years. “Hacker News” reported that Name.Com was not the true target and that Hack the Planet actually wanted to track a different hackers’ group that was causing troubles for Hack the Planet.

It is reported that the other group of hackers masquerading a third group of people called “ac1db1tch3z” actually tried to cause troubles for the botnet of Hack the Planet (henceforth referred to as HTP). HTP managed to find out that SwiftIRC was hosting the IRC channel that was used by the other group. So, HTP decided to access SwiftIRC hosted in Linode so that they could return the favor of causing troubles to the masquerading group. So, HTP accessed SwiftIRC by breaching Linode whose domain name registrar was Name.Com. Thus, to access Linode, HTP had to hack Name.Com.

Once Name.Com identified the breach, they sent emails with password reset links to all their customers. In the email, the service provider stated that unauthorized individuals have breached the security and managed to access crucial customer information that included email addresses, usernames, encrypted passwords and even encrypted details of credit card information. The web hosting service and the domain name registrar however mentioned that the private crypto keys needed for decrypting the encrypted credit card details could not be accessed by the hackers because Name.Com stored them in a remote location.

Once the users used the password reset links to generate a new password, they were allowed to access their accounts. The company however did not disclose how this security breach actually took place. Name.Com is the registrar for nearly half a million active domain names and apart from web hosting and domain registration, it also provides services for SSL certification.

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