On August 6, 2019, the Sonoma Valley Hospital went into red alert. Celia Kruse de la Rosa, the hospital’s communications director, noted at the time that SVH.com, their prestigious three letter .com domain and hospital acronym, had been “maliciously acquired.”
It was yet another case of domain hijacking, with a highly valuable LLL .com getting stolen at Network Solutions. The thief moved the domain quickly away from the US registrar’s control and onto BizCN, a Chinese domain registrar. At the same time, SVH.com was moved under Cloudflare’s DNS, using their proxy DNS service to hide their locale.
The Sonoma Valley Hospital operators soon found out that the domain’s theft was not related to tapping into hospital records or other important information; the theft of SVH.com took place due to the domain’s value as an aged three letter .com domain.
The hospital soon moved to the domain SonomaValleyHospital.org in order to re-establish their online presence and search engine visibility. Three years later, Googling “Sonoma Valley Hospital” points to the new domain as the top result and SVH.com is nowhere to be found.
It’s not clear if the hospital did anything to reclaim their domain name, whether that was to file a police report, lawsuit, or any type of correspondence with the registrar, Network Solutions. The hijacked domain name SVH.com is still in the possession of presumably Chinese criminals, being renewed annually.
All that remains is the coverage of the domain’s theft by the Sonoma Index Tribune.
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Avoid Network Solutions like the plague! I have a domain stolen there too and NS couldn’t do anything about it. I suspect that NS is in cahoots with thieves.