Police Lose National High-Tech Crime Unit Website

Barence writes "The UK police have embarrassingly lost control of the National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) website. PC Pro reports the police have sloppily let the domain registration lapse, and it has now been picked up by an opportunistic German owner. The NHTCU was disbanded two years ago, but sites such as the BBC were still linking to the website as recently as July, making it a prime target for malware writers or phishing attacks."

Comments

Why does everything need its own domain name?

[Ed Avis]

This illustrates why it's not always a good idea for every sub-organization, project and campaign to use its own top-level domain name. If the unit was part of the British government, surely a domain underneath .gov.uk would have been appropriate? Then you need not pay any fees to register it (except perhaps from one part of the government to another) and it can never be taken over by spammers.

What's the big deal?

[VdG]

Since it's my taxes that pay for it, I'm quite happy to see the registration lapse. This is a bit of a non-story and wouldn't be an issue if other people kept their links up-to-date.

Misleading Title

[Anonymous Coward]

The title's a bit misleading considering the organization is now defunct anyway.

Re:Can't admit a mistake?

[ChowRiit]

I must admit it's to me surprising that a slashdot user would pay their bill on an old domain like that and trust that AT&T won't do something equally as stupid: after all, such a domain is an even more prime target for phishing and the like. Where's the slashdot cynicism?

.gov.uk

[Raedwald]

If they had used a .gov.uk domain, rather than a TLD, would this have happened?

Cynicism is powerless against laziness!

[bigtallmofo]

I must admit it's to me surprising that a slashdot user would pay their bill on an old domain like that and trust that AT&T won't do something equally as stupid

I'm quite sure that AT&T is just that stupid. However, I'm too lazy to do anything about it.