As an early domain name investor, Mike O’Connor had by 1994 snatched up several choice online destinations, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. Some he sold over the years, but for the past 26 years O’Connor refused to auction perhaps the most sensitive domain in his stable — corp.com. It is sensitive because years of testing shows whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other proprietary data belonging to hundreds of thousands of systems at major companies around the globe.
Now, facing 70 and seeking to simplify his estate, O’Connor is finally selling corp.com. The asking price — $1.7 million — is hardly outlandish for a 4-letter domain with such strong commercial appeal. O’Connor said he hopes Microsoft Corp. will buy it, but fears they won’t and instead it will get snatched up by someone working with organized cybercriminals or state-funded hacking groups bent on undermining the interests of Western corporations.
One reason O’Connor hopes Microsoft will buy it is that by virtue of the unique way Windows handles resolving domain names on a local network, virtually all of the computers trying to share sensitive data with corp.com are somewhat confused Windows PCs. More importantly, early versions of Windows actually encouraged the adoption of insecure settings that made it more likely Windows computers might try to share sensitive data with corp.com.
At issue is a problem known as “namespace collision,” a situation where domain names intended to be used exclusively on an internal company network end up overlapping with domains that can resolve normally on the open Internet.
O’Connor said Microsoft actually offered to buy the domain several years back for $20,000. He turned them down, saying that at the time he thought it was too low and didn’t reflect the market value of the domain.
Asked why he didn’t just give corp.com to Microsoft as an altruistic gesture, O’Connor said he believes the software giant ought to be accountable for its products and mistakes.
“It seems to me that Microsoft should stand up and shoulder the burden of the mistake they made,” he said. “But they’ve shown no real interest in doing that, and so I’ve shown no interest in giving it to them. I don’t really need the money. I’m basically auctioning off a chemical waste dump because I don’t want to pass it on to my kids and burden them with it. My frustration here is the good guys don’t care and the bad guys probably don’t know about it. But I expect the bad guys would like it.”
Via https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/dangerous-domain-corp-com-goes-up-for-sale/