Midascode | Buy & Sell Websites

Reports are circulating of a security breach at Flippa and screenshots have been posted online of what their admin interface looks like.

The known hacker (and possibly some unknown ones) may have had access to all Flippa accounts, private messages, bids, watchlists and other user controlled functions.

Flippa has neither accepted nor denied the allegations.

It would be a prudent move to change your Flippa account password. If you’ve ever given Flippa access to take a pdf of your Google Analytics stats, it may be worth changing the password of your GA account as well. If you’ve used Flippa’s integration with the escrow.com service … you get the picture.

As Flippa and Sitepoint have common logins, this may apply to you even if you don’t use Flippa, but have an account at the Sitepoint forums.

I don’t believe anyone has blogged about this yet.

Details are patchy at the moment, but Flippa’s General Manager Dave Slutzkin has announced that Flippa is adding an escrow service to their site. It’s in partnership with escrow.com (well known, but seriously flawed) and is likely to be an optional service buyers and sellers can use at Flippa.

In the past there’ve been instances where Flippa wasn’t paid the “success fee” for a site selling in their marketplace. The advantage with having an in-house escrow is that Flippa will now know when a site sold in the marketplace has changed hands (whether on not the WHOIS is modified). Honest buyers and sellers who aren’t looking to cheat Flippa out of their success fee should have no issues with Flippa knowing the sale completion date.

It’s not yet known whether the pricing will be fair i.e. users being charged for only the service provided: escrow on the domain. It may well follow escrow.com’s current pricing: price based on the entire value of the site even though it’s only the domain that’s getting escrow protection.