Re: [nc-whois] accuracy: uk.com

[k@widgital.com (Kristy McKee)]

Is this fact or fiction?

At 03:43 PM 11/11/2002 +0100, Thomas Roessler wrote:
>FYI, from ICANNwatch: http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=1016
>
>>NTKnow, which in prolonged bout of needless modesty persists in
>>billing itself as "*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the
>>uk" (rather than, say, "one of the consistently finest (and
>>typo-free) publications on the net"), provides a succinct
>>explanation of an unfortunate automated interaction between antispam 
>>forces, ICANN, and Verisign. The result: a lot of people and
>>resources operating under the uk.com domain were temporarily
>>"disappeared" for no very good reason.
>>
>>   UK.COM, the slightly silly but popular para-TLD, disappeared   briefly 
>> from the Net this week. The reason, as ever in DNSland,   was a 
>> combination of overearnestness and mild incompetence that   slowly 
>> escalated until it hit Verisign, home of *fantastic*   incompetence.  It 
>> started with spamcop and rfc-ignorant.org   deciding they'd seen spam 
>> from a *.uk.com domain - and therefore,   uk.com were responsible. Their 
>> bots checked the uk.com admin   details - and, by a quirk, failed to 
>> find a valid mailserver. So   they reported uk.com as having invalid 
>> whois details to a bot at   ICANN. That bot turned and told Verisign. Of 
>> course, Verisign as   the last port of call, had the sense to check with 
>> a huma - oh,   what am I saying? Ten days after the first mistake, 
>> without   apparently contacting uk.com by phone, post or mail, Verisign 
>> shut   down the domain, killing thousands of other sites. Which 
>> presents   an interesting denial of service attack on a domain: it seems 
>> if   you can report to ICANN that a domain's details are wrong, 
>> there's   a good chance of it escalating until your victim has vanished 
>> from   the Net. Heck, just reporting a fake spam might do it. ICANN 
>> and   Verisign updated the DNS root hints file this week, for the 
>> first   time in five years. If only we could send them the occasional 
>> hint   back.
>>
>>The moral, which we all knew anyway: a system is only as secure (or 
>>stable) as its weakest link.
>
>--
>Thomas Roessler                        <roessler@does-not-exist.org>