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0 pointsghshephard12y ago0 comments

I realize it's an appeal to authority, but if there is one company that would have a lot to lose if its domain was ever exploited, it's google.

http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=google.com&t...

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4 comments · 1 top-level

pbhjpbhj12y ago· 3 in thread

I think Google actually stand to lose less than a smaller corporation. The registry will not assign Google to another company in any way that passes any eyeballs without seriously questioning it; if it did get re-assigned then they wouldn't have a problem recovering it. It's not likely to be gone for more than a few seconds before it's noticed and customers who were phished, or whatever, wouldn't be that likely to leave Google because of it.

That said I think appeal to authority is quite useful in this situation.

danielweber12y ago

I would agree that any attempt to reassign google.com ought to raise someone's eyebrows.

But I would have said the same about mit.edu and they got reassigned about a year ago. Obviously not for long, but the damage someone well-prepared could do by owning google.com for just 30 minutes is scary.

pbhjpbhj12y ago

There's no way anyone could own it for more than a couple of minutes before Google had contacted the managers of the root name servers and ICANN to revert. Like the sibling comment intimates handling the traffic would be nigh impossible - easier to control and perform a localised attack on a nameserver to "own" google.com for a limited subset of users.

codeflo12y ago

The "well prepared" part makes me wonder. What kind of infrastructure would you need to handle google.com's traffic? I don't think any of the cloud providers can scale up to that kind of traffic out of the box, and it's not like someone can just build and staff a dozen data centers in preparation of this hijack attempt.

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