CyanogenMod domain shuts down after extortion attempt [Update]

Some sad news has appeared over the past few hours regarding the most popular and biggest community developed ROM for Android. No, our beloved CyanogenMod ROM isn’t going anywhere but their domain, official site, entire history, and email has all been shut down and compromised as of late. Sadly when things get big sometimes greed gets involved and that’s exactly the case here.

CyanogenMod was a small custom ROM for the original G1 back 3-4 years ago, but has since grown into one of the latest and most popular custom ROM’s for Android. It’s a huge team, group, and organization that the Android Community loves. Almost so big in fact that some are hoping they’ll release their own CyanogenMod Phone at some point in the future. The problem is back a few years ago when things were small, a 3rd party purchased the CyanogenMod.com domain and donated it — something that has now caused some trouble.

Update: According to @Cyanogen himself everything has been resolved, and we should all just forget about this. I guess the two parties have worked things out. Good news for Android fans everywhere.

While we don’t have all the information or details at this point, it seems that for some reason or another there’s been some altercations, and the owner of the CyanogenMod domain, email address, and everything else has essentially shut it down. Here’s the 3rd party’s email to the CM Team:

“Hi, so you think by removing all my access across the infrastructure was going to be a great idea? We had a chat yesterday, you’ve decided to end this bitter. How about I just change the DNS entries right now. CM will practically go down.”

Again, we don’t know the entire story, which we are sure there are two sides to. Apparently after impersonating the CyanogenMod leader Steve Kondik, for his own personal gain and getting caught things have turned sour. The domain owner thus asked for $10,000 to turn the keys over to the true owners, which they won’t do, and can’t afford, and now everything’s been shut down.

For more details on this sad story of anger, trust, and greed you’ll be able to find more right from the CM team. They’ve since transitioned what they had to CyanogenMod.org and posted this blog entry. Since shutting down the CM.com page they’ve lost all their records, and essentially disappeared from the internet. This is sad news that obviously should have never happened, but it did. For now the CM10 progress is still working strong and they’ll probably continue to push out custom ROM’s for all of our favorite devices, they just might be a little behind. Hopefully they can get this sorted out and get back to doing what they love — which is offering custom builds of Android for their fans worldwide.

[via CyanogenMod]