Free Speech and DDOS Attacks

Name.com received a DDOS attack Thursday morning that took down our homepage and much of our site.  Several news agencies have since inquired as to what exactly happened and at least one article has been written about this event: Cyber attack cripples U.S. website covering Bo Xilai scandal.  To answer those questions we put together a statement for the press and are posting on our blog to give our customers…. the rest of the story:

In the early morning of Thursday, April 19th, we received a demand letter via email instructing us to disable the boxun.com domain or we would suffer a DDoS attack as a result. Shortly thereafter, our network operations team was made aware of the fact that our main website and nameservers had come under a massive DDoS attack, later to be determined one of the largest ones in the company’s history.

We immediately reached out to our customer, the domain owner of boxun.com, and explained the situation. We discussed with them what options were available that were in the best interest of both parties. Unfortunately, we did not believe that Name.com could keep both the boxun.com website and the other 1.5 million domains under our management online at the same time, so we requested the domain owner transfer boxun.com to another registrar of their choice. During the attack Name.com received an additional demand email that stated that unless we handed over the domain to the attackers and told the original owner that it was stolen, the attackers would continue the DDoS attack of our website and nameservers. At this point we helped the customer transfer the domain to another registrar as quickly as possible.

Strong arm tactics such as this hurt the free exchange of ideas that the internet is meant to enable. Name.com supports free speech and has been a strong supporter of both the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We find it regrettable that free speech is not yet a universal right.  We hope to support boxun.com in the future.

(Please direct any media queries or additional questions to bill@name.com)