WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Spare the rod, spoil the web - the Verisign Worm

Sometimes I ask my children to do things around the house. I'm not sure if that makes me an awful parent or not, but the looks I get from them (weary, hostile, weak, pathetic etc) suggest they think so as I ask them to tidy away plates, clear the room or do small maintenance chores. I love them so I cut them some slack, especially when they reply to me "Yes, Dad, I'll do it, leave me alone" after I ask for the sixth time.

I don't love Verisign one little bit. My customer experience with them has been uniformly dreadful, and Sitefinder is a gross imposition on the good will of the Internet amounting to a 'worm'. In case you haven't noticed it, Sitefinder is a nasty trick Verisign has played in abuse of their privileged status running the *.com and *.net internet domains on behalf of ICANN (the quango that administers the US parts of the Internet). Verisign has exploited a defect in the design of the domain name system (DNS) that means they are able to redirect all failed DNS access to their own web site. This means:

• All mis-spelled web browser access goes to them
• If you send e-mail and there's a temporary network failure at the recipient end, it gets diverted to Verisign according to some reports (although Steve Crocker of ICANN only alleges it makes the error messages unreliable)
• Web services applications fail in a different and unpredictable way as connection failures may get diverted to Verisign
• Filtering spam can fail because reverse look-ups of originators always succeed
• ... and so on - as bad as any other internet worm

Verisign applied this change without permission, without consultation, without warning and possibly in violation of their contract with ICANN.

ICANN asked them nicely to suspend the 'service', and Verisign just said no, flat. So yesterday ICANN said 'shut it down now or else' and Versign ungraciously said 'Yes, Dad, I'll do it, leave me alone' - CNET quotes this:

"Without so much as a hearing, ICANN today formally asked us to shut down the SiteFinder service," Russell Lewis said in a statement, "We will accede to the request while we explore all of our options."

That's not how I read it in ICANN's letter - Lewis seems to have been trained in the same school where Microsoft learned to say sorry. Anyway, as of right now and in spite of reports to the contrary, the worm is still there (test here) and it seems Verisign's "yes dad" is hollow. I don't beat my children, but in this case I'd remind ICANN, "Spare the rod, spoil the child".

Update: Looks like they went right to the wire - worm seems gone now at 2am (6pm PDT).

posted at 2:32 PM (UK) | |