By using a flawless domain seizure methodology, the U.S. government has managed to slander 84,000 innocent sites at once. Here’s what happened.
Last Friday, as part of “Operation Save Our Children,” Homeland Security’s Cyber Crimes Center had seized several domain names. Among them, a popular shared domain belonging to FreeDNS. But the ICE didn’t realize (or care) that by seizing the shared domain they would also seize its 84,000 subdomains – most of which were personal sites and sites of small businesses. So anyone visiting any of the wrongfully seized domain names ended up looking at this message:
All seized domains were redirected to this message.
Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.
Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.
Classy, ICE.
