[Infowarrior] - More on....Seclists.Org shut down by Myspace and GoDaddy

[Richard Forno]

(c/o dissent)

Wired's 27B Stroke 6 blog has a follow-up to this:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/01/godaddy_defends.html#more

by Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen
Thursday, 25 January 2007

GoDaddy Defends SecLists Takedown

GodaddyGoDaddy got back to me. General counsel Christine Jones
defends taking down SecLists.org, saying that Fyodor had close to an
hour to respond to GoDaddy's voicemail and e-mail warnings
yesterday, and didn't.

"We couldn't reach him, and because the content was hundreds and
hundreds of MySpace user names and password, we went ahead and
redirected the domain to remove that content," she says.

An hour's notice doesn't seem much time before shutting down
someone's  website, particularly when the content in question is
nine days old. Jones says there was urgency, because so many MySpace
users are young teenagers, and they could suffer serious privacy
invasions if perverts start logging into their profiles to get
private photos and messages.

"For something that has safety implication like that, we take it
really seriously," she says. "For spammers, we give people a little
bit of time to respond to us."

Ouch. Archiving Full Disclosure is worse than spamming.

I still find the whole thing chilling. The domain registrar isn't
the logical place for a surgical strike against one web page or a
single file -- it can do nothing except take down an entire domain
with, in this case, thousands of pages. So why did MySpace call
GoDaddy, instead of Fyodor or his ISP? -- the polite and customary
approach.

 My theory is MySpace went  forum shopping for the best place to get
the password list squelched, and ended up at GoDaddy because they
expected the friendliest reception there. And that's the risk:
every new link in internet service -- network operators, hosting
companies, and now domain registrars -- willing to take on a
censorship role increases the likelihood of legitimate content
being suppressed.

Jones stands by the decision.

"Should registrars be involved in this? I'm not sure," she says.
"We're the largest domain registrar in the world, and my view is,
for $8.95 its not okay for somebody to come and use our services to
harm other people."


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