from snagged.com... The Domain Microsoft Had to Buy — 26 years of leaked secrets! Many of you (and me) – own more domains than we can build on — so I am in no position to judge anyone for letting a good name sit idle. But corp.com took it to an extreme: 26 years of “innocently” collecting passwords, emails, and login attempts from hundreds of thousands of corporate laptops whose owners had no idea. The owner is a nice guy in Wisconsin named Mike O'Connor, who registered corp.com in the mid-90s alongside bar.com, grill.com, and television.com, then never built on it. Meanwhile, Microsoft shipped Windows 2000 with "Corp" as the example name for a company network, and thousands of IT departments kept the default. So when a laptop wandered off the office network looking for its servers, Windows sent it knocking on corp.com. Nobody hacked anything…it just worked in the wrong direction. Researchers spent years measuring the leak (the Department of Homeland Security helped pay for some of it), and when Brian Krebs wrote about it in 2020, Mike decided to sell. He didn’t want his kids inheriting a domain that passively collected Fortune 500 credentials. He listed it at auction starting at $1.7 million, and Microsoft, whose own documentation helped create the problem, bought it. Corp.com now sits in their portfolio doing nothing, which is probably the best possible use of it. So the lesson from corp.com: do nothing with a domain for 26 years and Microsoft might buy it. I've been following this plan for more than a decade. Still waiting on the call. ✌️