"After Hudson rightfully said no, the engineer responded by hijacking the site, right down to the domain name. And he did a pretty good job of it. No one could

"After Hudson rightfully said no, the engineer responded by hijacking the site, right down to the domain name. And he did a pretty good job of it. No one could help. Other engineers didn’t have the required credentials. His hosting provider had no means to solve the problem. And even GoDaddy (where he registered the domain) couldn’t figure out a good way around the hack that the engineer had devised to hold the site and its contents hostage." It's strange to me that the registrar would acknowledge that a takeover had happened but wouldn't be able to fix it, unless the domains were transferred to another registrar. The article doesn't give any details, but if that's the case, the lesson there is not to give other people access to your account at that level (GoDaddy provides a feature to prevent exactly that situation: http://www.godaddy.com/account/accountexec.aspx http://www.godaddy.com/account/accountexec.aspx).