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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.
The best money could buy.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Does not seem legal.
It's legal if the law says it is. And when the lawmakers are in bed with Big Business, like they are in the US, anything goes.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So after decades of the community putting Microsoft on notice that HotMail is abused by spammers, can I sieze the domain name?
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Now it appears that Microsoft is using their reputation for producing security-challenged software to badger companies for PR purposes. The headlines will all read, ~Microsoft takes down a company that is a security threat~. And Microsoft will look good in the headline.
But what has Microsoft really accomplished? Will Microsoft's reputation for software with abysmal security be changed? Or will a small company be crushed because a huge company is trying to look good?
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 don't serve anything important... but I usually post images through my local server and upload to imgur "through the web" - it took several retries when I tried to do this a short while ago, and now I know why.
Thanks, Microsoft.... you can't just take over no-ip and then run it through crap servers that can't handle the loads.
i wonder if the same court would let you take update.microsoft.com and redirct it to ftp.debian.org using this reasoning
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
Bullshit.
April 2013: http://labs.opendns.com/2013/0...
Sept 2013: No-IP is a preferred choice for other similar attacks for command and control infrastructure: http://threatpost.com/njw0rm-a...
Feb 2014: Even Cisco said their domains were being abusive and they posted to complain that Cisco didn't contact them. http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/...
Looks to me like they should have contacted Microsoft and asked them for help. I guess they waited too long.
So, Microsoft's argument was that they needed to hijack thousands of computers, secretly redirect them and put people in financial strain... so that someone else couldn't hijack thousands of computers, secretly redirect them and put people in financial strain?
Great plan, fuckwits!
A quick skim of the motion for the court order gave me the "boilerplate" and "cut & paste" feeling. There is a lot of sloppy line blurring between actions and complaints directed at the Malware authors and the no-ip folks. Sometimes they refer to the "Malware Defendants" and other times the generic "Defendants" when they meant the former. Really sloppy legal work.
There are some real gems in there:
From section 7:
"There is good cause to believe that immediate and irreparable damage to this Court’s ability to grant effective final relief will result from the sale, transfer, or other disposition or concealment by Defendants of the Internet domains at issue"
Say what? How is that related anything? Its not like the TRO will actually prevent people from being able to hit 'delete' via the control panel. Given that everything's busted by their own doing, the bad guys got a huge head start.
From section 8: ..." ...
"... and the interest of justice require that this Order be Granted without prior notice to Defendants
Wow
The full motion text: http://www.noticeoflawsuit.com...
It seems to me that regardless of what good intentions that Microsoft may have had, they've really fouled up the execution. They'll be remembered more for taking out millions of legitimate users than the malware they *might* be able to take down.
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.
Security cameras is another common usage. A low cost installation has some IP cameras on a residential dynamic IP internet service, so you use no-ip for access. I can't access my vacation house feeds today. For all I know there might be gnomes partying around the premises right now. Thanks MS.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
I can understand your confusion. They do after all call it the Justice system. That though is a lie.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I don't know where you went to school, but you should ask for a refund. Or read up on basic percentage calculations.
Microsoft claims that 93% of the malware traffic is traced to No-IP. But that says nothing about the total amount of traffic for No-IP, nor does it say anything about the total volume of legitimate domains. Malware traffic could be as little as 1% on No-IP's infrastructure while still accounting for 93% of malware DDNS traffic.
It is completely wrong to state that 93% of No-IP domains are hosting malware. A large number of legitimate customers are being affected by this, and Microsoft is not resolving their DDNS domains correctly (as promised). The actual percentage of legitimate vs malicious domains is unknown, as is the distribution of legit/malicious traffic.
Also, Microsofts claims are disputed by No-IP, so we should not take them at face value. No real evidence of malice has been proven (yet), which makes it extremely questionable that this was conducted ex parte.
Finally, the fact that No-IP was a favorite for malware is not (or should not be) in itself sufficient to take control of the domains like this. I sincerely hope Microsoft can prove No-IP did not respond properly to requests. Or that they can document that an extremely large portion of total traffic on No-IP was malware (which we know nothing about at this point).
Simply quoting the 93% number is a pile of BS. I can't stand by itself. I can say with certainty that at least 93% of the Nigerian scam mail I have received the last year has used a hotmail.com or outlook.com account. But surely this does not prove that Microsoft is willingly aiding Nigerian scammers and that their domains should be seized?
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...