David Airey won't back down

ICDSoft

As ICDSoft is involved in the situation, we would like to give more details about its part in it.

ICDSoft is a hosting company that also provides domain registration services. We register the domains for our customers at a parent registrar - Enom.com, but we handle all details in regards to domain properties, domain management access, locking/unlocking, etc.

On 20-Nov-2007 we have received a request, posted from the support panel of Mr. Airey, to unlock the domain and to provide the EPP domain transfer authorization code. The access to the panel requires an administrative password, which should be known only by the account owner. We granted the request, as we had no reason to believe that someone else would have the password for the administrative panel. The "situation" is the same at all registrars - if someone has the password for the domain panel, they can lock/unlock domains, get EPP domain transfer authorization codes, change domain details, etc.
ICANN's Policy on Transfer of Registrations between Registrars does not allow more complicated security mechanisms (such as additional "secret" questions, ID verifications etc) for providing our customers with the EPP codes for the domains they own. This policy is established because many companies would misuse the "security" and their goal would be to prevent customers from transferring domains away from them. This is certainly not the case with us, and we do not make any attempts to prevent customers from managing their own domains. We disagree that ICDSoft has done anything incorrect that helped the attacker. It appears that he had access to the emails sent to the administrative address for the domain, which allowed him to approve the transfer (this is the additional security feature allowed by ICANN).

As soon as we were aware of the hijacking, we did everything we could on our end to assist our client with the problem he was experiencing. All queries David Airey had were responded by our support team in minutes.
We contacted GoDaddy, but received an answer that the request should come only from an accredited registrar.
We contacted our parent registrar - Enom. They assigned a transfer dispute manager, who started an "inter-registrar" investigation. Depending on its outcome, Enom would have started a transfer dispute at ICANN. Luckily, at this point Mr. Airey got his domain back.
Also, we did everything possible on our end to keep the blog up and running under a different domain name. Thus the problem attracted the attention of a high number of people, which helped to resolve the problem.
We are happy that the bloggers community itself has the power to help people and to narrow down the abuse in Internet.

David Airey seems to understand the problem with Danegeld

And i thank him for it. Refusing to pay an extortionist makes it less likely that the punk will try it on someone else.

He demands you give him money, give him the finger instead... or perhaps a better option, take a couple of his.

David Airey's Hijacking

I'm David's dad and want to thank you and everyone who has helped him to win his battle. I'm proud of all of you!