For a few hours one Friday afternoon, I experienced what it’s like to be stripped of your identity, a role Will Smith played in the thriller, “Enemy of the State.”

In that movie, Smith is a high-powered attorney who – without his knowledge – is given a video that ties a top official of the National Security Agency (played by Jon Voight) to a political murder. A lethal team of skilled NSA operatives wages a relentless, high-tech campaign to discredit Smith and retrieve the incriminating evidence.  In the meantime, Smith must deal with a world in which his assets are frozen, making something as simple as accessing an ATM machine impossible.

While my story doesn’t have the sizzle of “Enemy of the State,” what happened to my agency could happen to you, so I hope you keep reading and take immediate action.

During early 2001, we redesigned our website. Our new web developer promised to deliver one-stop shopping, and took care of everything, from design to all of the back-office details, such as DNS registration and web hosting. Based on his recommendation, we signed a five-year renewal contract on our domain name and secured the transaction with a credit card.

Tech Image started using GoDaddy to manage its various URLs in 2002. Since we weren’t receiving renewal notices for the techimage.com, .net and .org domain names, nobody noticed that the URLs weren’t on the list of domain names we managed at GoDaddy.

Fast-forward to 2006. Our company URLs are about to expire and the company we used in 2001 no longer exists. Its accounts were purchased in 2003 by a hosting company called DomainDiscover, which sends a series of emails to an address at Tech Image. The emails, however, may have been swept up by the spam filter and thus never arrive where they should. After DomainDiscover pings us three times, they attempt to automatically renew our domains using an expired credit card.

Instead of taking the next step and contacting us by phone, DomainDiscover simply allows our domain names to expire.  They had already allowed our .net domain name to run out in 2002, when it was snatched up by a Brazilian telecom company before falling to a private owner. The result is that for five hours Tech Image lost its .com and .org domain names. If you clicked on our website during this time, you’d see a banner ad from DomainDiscover that said, “This URL is available.” All email to Tech Image employees began bouncing.

When Tim Boivin, my director of media relations, alerted me to the problem, I nearly had a heart attack. We spent the afternoon making a series of frantic phone calls to resolve the problem. It took another 15 hours before our website went live again and the email issues were resolved. We lost our .net URL in the process. 

The moral of this story is simple:

·        Create an inventory of all of your domain names – note when the names expire and verify that your company’s credit card and contact information is up-to-date

·        Consolidate all URLs with a single domain registry and hosting service, preferably one that uses live people rather than relying solely on automated systems

·        Set a schedule to renew all domain names automatically and put a reminder in your Outlook or other calendar

·        Assign a trusted person to manage this process and a second person as backup

·        Store a copy of this information in a safe place (such as a safety deposit box)

·        Review this information every six months

Eventually in “Enemy of the State,” a little cleverness and some high tech help from Gene Hackman helps Will Smith beat the NSA at their own game and get his identity back. You don’t need to go through all that, though. A little precaution up front will help you avoid making the mistake that almost cost my company its identity.