Didn’t see any news about it this AM but it seems that DirectNIC may have been compromised. My wife just spoke with Bank of America regarding fraudulent activity on her credit card. According to the person she spoke with, DirectNIC had been compromised and there was a ping against her account to see if it was active (the transaction amount was undisclosed and is not showing up in her account at all). The representative from BOA also stated that DirectNIC was aware of the issue and authorities have been contacted. I have checked the credit card I have on file with them and there is a $0.00 transaction amount from “DIRECTNIC.COM” in pending as of November 11th, 2013. Normally transactions from DirectNIC show up as “WWW.DIRECTNIC.COM” and I did not make any domain purchases from them yesterday either.
If you use DirectNIC, I’d check your credit card you have on file immediately!
Follow Up
Michael Ward, COO of DirectNIC reached out to me via email. Evidently the ghost transaction is “due to a process change that we [DirectNIC] are in the middle of implementing with our new payment processor. The switch to our new provider required a pre-authorization charge of $0.00 just to ensure the card is still valid.”
Crisis averted! So glad I used “may have been” instead of “has been” in the title 😉
