Many of you may have seen over the last week or so that the domain davidairey.com suddenly redirected to a new site. You can read the story here, straight from David, to find out what happened. Basically someone hacked his account and was able to redirect his domain while he was on vacation.
Please update your bookmarks, blogrolls and post links (if you have time) from davidairey.com to http://www.davidairey.co.uk for David. It will greatly help him recover from this terrible incident. And spread the word with a post like this!
I’ll be going through my links here and updating them to the new domain.
Update: Thanks to the great people at GoDaddy, David now has his domain back! Congrats David!

Thanks so much, Lauren. I greatly appreciate you helping spread the word, and here’s hoping to a speedy resolution to the issue.
The hacker is wanting money, and I won’t be held to ransom.
Have you been keeping well?
David,
Don’t even mention it! This is the least I could do to help you recover. I can’t believe the hacker is wanting money! That is so ridiculous. He should be paying you for all your losses! I hope the legal proceedings are not stressful and turn out in your favor (I can’t logically see how anything except that could happen, but lawyers can be a tricky lot).
I have been well, yes! And my little blog is growing quite nicely
Thanks for asking!
I noticed your feed count.
Great job! You’ll have me caught up in no time.
I’ve been reading up, and it seems that the legal fees will be more than what the hacker is asking for. I really don’t want to hand over any money though.
Cutting my losses is a distinct possibility.
David,
Yeah, legal stuff can be expensive. They won’t make the other guy pay your fees if you win? Is there a reason you don’t want to keep .co.uk?
I’m not sure about that now, Lauren.
As for keeping the .co.uk, I previously redirected that domain to the .com, so thankfully only the .com was taken.
Thing is, the .com was receiving well over 2,000 unique visits per day, and now I get next to none. Also, everyone who still sees the old .com search results will be directed to a holding page, which isn’t great for my name.
These are little things though, and I’ll get through it no worries.
Crazy buiness huh? I only caught up with it yesterday in my feeds (after putting my computer in for repairs and Christmas). Today he’s got his domain back, which is good news.
Even my husband heard about it (on Digg)!
Makes us all feel slightly uneasy about domains and email if it’s that easy. Makes me feel slightly sick to think that people are so horrible as well!
Kristarella,
It is nerve wracking, but I read in the billions of comments over on David’s site that it’s really not that easy to do and the cracker used a Gmail exploit that is now fixed. His Web host should have taken a little more precaution, like asking a persona question, when releasing a domain registration like that, too. I’m very glad all the business is cleared up for David now and that he didn’t have to pay any money. GoDaddy really helped him out and I’m glad they didn’t have a bunch of robots over there that only “follow the rules.”
I know money is the reason his domain was stolen, but it is still unbelievable that someone would go through so much hassle to make money illegally. Why not just get a normal job like everyone else? Makes me wonder how someone like that can sleep at night, knowing they’ve ruined someone else’s life and livelihood.
It’s a great idea for my web host to ask a personal question before transferring domains. That would’ve saved a lot, although who knows how long I would’ve gone on with that filter in my GMail account. I shudder a little to think of just how many personal emails were forwarded to that other email account.
All in all, the publicity has helped me out, so there’s certainly a positive to the story. ;)
David,
Again, so glad this has worked out for you! And it’s been great to see your positive attitude and the constructive work you did (instead of just complaining). I’m also very impressed that you stood your ground about not paying and it all came out in your favor. Congrats!
Thank you again Lauren. I find complaining doesn’t help much, and that good always tends to win out over bad.
Have a fantastic 2008!
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