Put Your Own Organisation's Name On It

This week a friend contacted me about his business website. It seemed his company had paid for both a .co.uk and .com domain name, but the latter was not currently mapped to her site.

It seems the web developer wasn't being co-operative and she was asking for some advice. It appeared that neither domain were registered in my friend's company's name—both named the developers. This makes things much more difficult if the developers are slow to respond to change requests, or fail to renew your domains, or you fall out with them or they go out of business.

But I came across another example on Wednesday. I had to drive through London and later in the day I went to pay the £8.00 charge using the congestion charge online payment service from Transport for London.

I looked at the SSL certificate's details and was very surprised to see the organisation named on the certificate (known as the distinguished name field for organization) was not "Transport for London" but "Cobweb Solutions Ltd", presumably this company.

Whilst this may not be contrary to the SSL Protocol Specification, it is contrary to expectations and good practice. If this were a retail website (where you choose to buy rather than being obligated to pay!), would a cautious potential customer trust the site? The information has also given away vital clues to a malicious user on the software development company and thus perhaps possible approaches to breach the system. Cobweb Solutions' own site has a shopping basket/e-commerce system that has a similarly attributed secure certificate:

Like domain names, your own website SSL certificates, regardless of SSL certificate type should be in your own organisation's name, not anyone else's. In fact this also usually makes the proces of purchasing a certificate simpler.

On my friend's domain name issue, she has contacted the relevant domain name registrars using their disputes process to ask for the details to be updated. She is also checking whose name is on the web hosting contract.