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Microsoft Takes Down No-IP.com Domains
An anonymous reader writes For some reason that escapes me, a Judge has granted Microsoft permission to hijack NoIP's DNS. This is necessary according to Microsoft to thwart a "global cybercrime epidemic" being perpetrated by infected machines running Microsoft software.
No-IP is a provider of dynamic DNS services (among other things). Many legitimate users were affected by the takedown: "This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives. ... We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening."
This is their business the court decided to hand over to Microsoft. Lawsuits should be flying in all directions.
If a judge granted permission, I have feeling that a domain name service provider may have been guilty of alerting their customers to legal intentions. Which gives credence to locking it down before a new sub-domain is created to deliver the same traffic. While I don't side based on a brief, I don't make adverse statements. I can only surmise.
So after decades of the community putting Microsoft on notice that HotMail is abused by spammers, can I sieze the domain name?
What is the legal precedent for taking ownership of a company's assets (without apparently even informing them beforehand) and randomly giving them to some other company to use? How is that even a legal possibility?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
While I fully blame Microsoft for creating this mess, I'm somewhat dismayed that as a customer I'm finding out that my service is down from a news outlet rather than from noip themselves! I've been using their sub domain wildcard service for 7-8 years now and have just now found out that it's down. I'm none too happy about being thrown out with the bathwater!
Evil is as eval("does");
I have a $10/mo VPS at a major datacenter with static IPv4 & IPv6 addresses that hosts the primary DNS server for my vanity domain. My house has plain old boring dynamic address DSL with filtered port 25, etc... I have a Raspberry Pi running light network services on the house net. It runs a cron job that runs pubkey ssh into a no-shell account on the VPS. When that happens, a script rips $SSH_CLIENT and does a quick compare to see if it changed. If it has, another cron job on the VPS fixes up a record in my vanity domain with a 60 second TTL.
OpenVPN gets me around the port 25 filter...
Why am I explaining this to a low four digit?
So *that's* why my DDNS suddenly went dark today, with no apparent explanation.
Port 80 forwarding to the right LAN IP. Server daemons are running. I can access all the services directly by WAN IP (not very useful). Updater client running just fine. No firewall configs in the way. No-IP reports the correct IP. No news posting on No-IP's website about any sort of outage or technical issues.
Well, I was lost -- that was everything. ... and that was all because of this horseshit? Guess what... I'm not even *in* the US, so now the US courts think they have jurisdiction over countries? (OK, that's not new)
Fuck all involved. Hope they get their asses sued to hell. And this judge canned for such a dumbass decision.
If it wasn't for the all the holes in WIndows then there's would't be as many people trying to distribute malware. MS themselves are the first in line as the root cause.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So MS has a 'Digital Crimes Unit' and the US courts allow it to carry out law enforcement duties. How long before they have their own policemen, courts and prisons? It goes together with the Microsoft tax I suppose.
I also suspect they've managed to botch the technical aspect of it as well.
Presumably the plan was to put their caching name servers in front of the real no-ip servers, and gather the mappings for the malware suspect sites and then blackhole them after getting what they want. The problem was that Microsoft's side appears to have melted down, thus taking everything down. They won't be getting logs, behavior analysis or anything, because its all a pile of wreckage in a crater. Meanwhile, all the "bad guys(TM)" have now had hours head start to delete their C&C node registrations while microsoft's servers are down. And now they've ticked off the no-ip folks, so I wouldn't expect them to be in a cooperative mood to try and help.
Bone headed all round. There's no other way to put it.
And this is why we need Namecoin and other decentralized DNS solutions to take such matters out of the hands of the lawmakers.
http://namecoin.info/
IAAL (but this isn't legal advice). I noticed that it was an ex parte hearing, which is why this whole mess occurred. They're useful for preventing domestic violence, but ripe for abuse in all contexts. NO-IP should be moving for an emergency hearing and the whole issue should be resolved within hours. Beyond that, NO-IP should follow-up with a suit for damages (I suspect MS will pull the we-got-a-court-order card and NO-IP gets to respond back with you lied to the court. It all goes nowhere and they settle).
The more interesting aspect is the disrupted users. While MS moved against NO-IP ex parte, they apparently made assertions that they would keep the service functioning properly. They've failed there and suits are now possible for those failures. More interestingly, however, is whether MS was recording, manipulating, or in any other way playing with the traffic. If so, there are some excellent wiretap statutes waiting to be had.
I, sadly, didn't have an NO-IP account, but if I did, I'd be heading to the court house this afternoon. This is what happens when you skip due process, let a to-big-to-fail corporation do whatever it wants to private corporations through the guise of the courts. Corruption at it's finest. MS should be bludgeoned thoroughly enough to at least think twice before attempting it again.