Turkish hackers Thursday defaced the official sites of the international organizations that oversee the Internet’s critical routing infrastructure and regulate domain names, researchers said Friday. A group calling itself “NetDevilz” claimed responsibility for the hack, which Thursday morning temporarily redirected visitors to the sites for IANA ( Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Users who tried to reach iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net were shunted to an illegitimate site, said researchers at zone-h.org, a group that collects evidence of site attacks, including page defacements and redirects. According to a screen capture of the defacement snapped by zone-h.org, the bogus site simply displayed a taunting message: “You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?”

IANA, ironically, is the organization responsible for managing the DNS (domain name system) root zone and assigning the DNS operators for the Internet’s top-level domains, such as .com and .org. DNS, which translates the domains and URLs such as computerworld.com into IP addresses, is a critical component of the Web’s traffic-guiding infrastructure.

ICANN, which oversees IANA, also allocates IP address space and manages the Web’s top-level domain naming system.

Perhaps not coincidental to the defacement, ICANN was in the news yesterday for voting to relax rules in assigning and managing generic top-level domains.

The hackers redirected IANA and ICANN traffic to the same IP address that they used last week when they broke into Photobucket Inc.’s image-sharing site and pushed its users to a server operated by Atspace.com, a German hosting service, said Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev in a blog post Friday.

A spokesman for ICANN contacted Friday morning wasn’t aware of the hack, and declined comment until he found find out more.

MySpace still has a hefty traffic lead over Facebook in the U.S., so it was big news when ComScore released 2008 data that showed Facebook gaining quickly on MySpace in international traffic. According to the data, Facebook already gets more international page views than MySpace and is gaining quickly in unique visitors. In January, Facebook had 100.7 million unique international visitors compared to MySpace’s 109.3 million; a difference of just 8% compared to a year ago when the difference was nearly 400%. While some other social networking tools dominate in specific international markets, no other platform comes close to the two U.S. giants in overall audience and reach.  

To many, Facebook’s international gains came as a surprise. MySpace had a head start getting into the global market, launching its first international site in Britain in April 2006 before rolling out sites in other European countries, generally with success. More recently, MySpace has begun launching in countries that are more difficult for U.S. companies to penetrate, including India, Russia and, this week, South Korea. In contrast, Facebook’s first non-English site didn’t launch until February 2008. MySpace still has more countries in which it is embedded in the local language — there are 29 translated versions of MySpace specialized for 25 countries. Facebook is currently available in only four languages: English, Spanish, French and German. Facebook has also faced some widely publicized hiccups with its international strategy, including the failure to purchase all of its localized domain names, such as Facebook.fr.  

But while MySpace plans and launches its international sites in a more traditional way — setting up local offices, getting entrenched in the culture and then launching, — Facebook is building out its foreign language versions with the help of its vast and committed user base. Instead of setting up an office and a staff before launching in new countries, Facebook is putting its audience to work with an online Facebook application that allows translation by the Facebook community. To participate, Facebook users add a Translation Application to their account that they can use to translate, review and vote on translations in their language. Once the language translations are completed and quality has been verified by the community, the Facebook site in the new language is launched for all Facebook users.

Facebook is currently working on 22 more language translations, and many hundreds of users have left suggestions about other languages that they would like to see translated — and have volunteered to help with the work.

This savvy approach to new markets will be what wins the international audience for Facebook. In combination with the widely used Facebook Platform, which will allow international developers to build Facebook applications for local audiences, Facebook’s international strategy is the better one. MySpace, with its less innovative international approach and still-new and largely untested developer’s platform, will not be able to catch up.  

MySpace does have one huge advantage in the U.S. market — it completely dominates Facebook in music. This could be the one area in which MySpace is able to build out its international presence and counter Facebook in new markets. However, the recent announcement of MySpace Music and its support by three of the four major record labels also included the news that MySpace Music would not be rolling out internationally until issues concerning international rights were solved. This was the final nail in the coffin of MySpace’s international hopes. The one area in which it had a chance will instead have the opposite effect of alienating its international users by making them an afterthought.  

(Obviously, Facebook and MySpace are not the only social networks, and there are a large number of other social networks that are #1 in various countries, including Orkut in Brazil, Live Journal in Russia and Bebo in New Zealand. For a rundown of the social networks that lead in various countries, check out “Social networks and international audiences.”)  

Melissa Chang is the founder of Pure Incubation, an Internet incubator based in the Boston area. Her blog is atwww.16thletter.com.   Source:www.thestandard.coma  

 

Most domainers buy and own names. They “park” on sites, where they develop content in the form of Web links and ads, to generate income and increase the value of their virtual real estate.

“It’s a long-term investment, like owning a home,” says Lawrence Fischer, vice president of business development at SmartName.com, a company that owns and manages thousands of domain names, including Stockquotes.com. “But if a major brokerage firm came along with a big offer, I would be willing to listen.”

 

Plenty have been willing to pay. Sales of 5,851 domain names generated $29 million in 2007, compared with the sale of 3,813 names for $15 million in 2006, market researcher Zetetic says.

Venture-capital firms, too, are betting on domains. Last year, Highland Capital Partners plunked down more than $20 million on YesDirect, a holding company with 600,000 domain names. YesDirect is developing content for websites using the names, says Bob Davis, a managing general partner at Highland.

Further underscoring the hot domain-name market: Its biggest trade show ever took place in Las Vegas last week. About 400 to 500 domainers and investors took part — double what the same show drew a year ago, organizer Rick Schwartz says. Officials at Yahoo and Google, both of which own domain names, attended. There, the largest live domain-name auction produced $2.1 million in sales in three hours.

 

HOW TO MAX REVENUE, ADD VALUE TO DOMAIN NAMES

1. Purchase a domain name. 2. Build a website based on the name, and establish Web links to related sites. 3. Place ads on your website. 4. Add content. 5. Sell products on site, establishing an e-commerce model.