We would like to address a recent report that was released by Cisco Securities.
The report noted many domains that the Cisco Security Team thought were abusive. We have not received any report from Cisco about any domains, or any supporting information. If Cisco wished to report abuse, they could have easily contacted our Abuse Team at abuse@no-ip.com.
The blog report measured different aspects of domain abuse. We think a key metric not used by Cisco is how fast an abuse report is handled, once properly reported. No-IP excels at handling abuse, verifying reported claims, and taking swift action. We invite Cisco to give that a try. This approach would have been more proactive than posting a blog about the abuse and not reporting their findings directly to us.
We would like to be on the record to state that at No-IP, we have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity. We work to achieve this by using filters that block certain words and we scan our network daily for signs of malicious activity. Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does fall prey to cyberscammers, spammers, and malware distributers.
With millions of customers using the No-IP free dynamic DNS service, our users are relying on millions of other people to do the right thing with their hosts, which unfortunately isn’t always the case.
How does this happen?
We are one of the last free dynamic DNS providers in the industry and we currently have over 17 million users worldwide. We provide a valuable service for free, but because of this, it is common for users to abuse our service. Our abuse team is amazing and they are usually pretty quick to shut them down, but sometimes a few can slip through the cracks. Dynamic DNS is often blamed for security issues, but there is so much more to dynamic DNS than just the dark side of it.
Dynamic DNS allows users to access their computer remotely while they are away from the office or on vacation, dynamic DNS also makes it easy for someone to be sure their home or office are safe by monitoring an IP camera remotely, or even check in on their dog while they are away from work. When used correctly, dynamic DNS can make your life easier and safer. Many businesses and Fortune 500 companies even support us in their hardware and recommend our services to their customers.
We pride ourselves in the services that we offer and we highly encourage our users and others to let us know if they come across a hostname that isn’t abiding by our Terms of Service; which includes having more than 1 No-IP account, using our domains to host illegal activity, and a laundry list of other things. We encourage you to report a violation of our TOS or any other abuses of our services to abuse@no-ip.com. At No-IP we take abuse issues very seriously and work with law enforcement daily to ensure that we are doing our part to keep the internet safe.