Anonymous domain registration nixed amid fraud complaints
A company that provides a controversial service to domain name registrars says it is severing ties with Estdomains amid complaints that the Eastern European company makes it too easy to register sites that are used by spammers and scammers. Directi, through a subsidiary called LogicBoxes, had been providing an array of products …
...are an interesting conundrum. If you allow them, they can be used to shield spammers and scammers... if you don't allow them (and don't allow bulletproof hosting services), you cut off the only means some people have to express dissent anonymously.
As much as I detest scammers and spammers, I'm inclined to think that the capability for truly (or at least, very much) anonymous domain registration and hosting is necessary.
There might be one way to solve the problem, though - disallow registration of massive numbers of domains at the same time, something which is extremely useful to scammers and irrelevant to pretty much everybody else. I'm not sure whether that's practical, though...
.....Whilst trying to get sites/domains killed when baiting the scammers who own them. Looks like the bad publicity from numerous scammers association (however distant) has hacked them off. Good. Now get proactive and enforce TOS against fraudulent domains and you'll rebuild that rep guys.
Dead Vulture ? Yup in honour of those registries and hosting co's who have shutdown fraudulent sites and domains.
anon, for obvious reasons.
While this on it's face seems like a positive step, one needs to look ahead to see if this actually turns into something good or it's just an appeasement.
The type of reputation damage this has done over the years may not be recoverable. Especially from the sec comm as on the whole, they're not soon to forgive and forget so easily.
Time will tell for sure.
I've seen estdomains all over the place--namely, nearly every time I find a new server dropping the W32/Zlob malware. Invariably, the servers actually serving up the malicious payloads are registered through estdomains and protected by PrivacyProtect.
This is good news. Better still would be to make it retroactive, and strip the PrivacyProtect service from sites already registered through estdomains.
Franklin - if you check you will find that domains registered through EST have already been stipped of privacy protection long ago. If any of them still have privacy protection it is through another source and not through LogicBoxes or Directi, and we cannot control the same
- Bhavin
CEO, Directi
I'd just like to say Well Done to El Reg for your past reports, & to Brian Krebs's article, which have helped bring about this change.
It may be just a small victory in the constant battle, but your part in it must be congratulated.
You could read Directi's official statement on its corporate blog:
http://blog.directi.com/company/our-official-response-to-malicious-reports-which-falsely-implicate-the-directi-group/
Read on folks and enlighten:
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/09/04/the-darksides-domains/
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