Small tech company in the Biggest Little City makes the Inc. 5000 list. We are so proud to announce that we have made the 2014 Inc. 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies! Inc. magazine has listed No-IP on the just released eighth annual Inc. 5000 – an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing
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At No-IP, our biggest concern has always been providing the best, most reliable service possible. Over the years we have worked hard to mitigate the numerous risks posed by malicious actors on the internet, from collocating multiple DNS nodes throughout the world to purchasing advanced server technology to guard against threats. We work hard to
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: No-IP Takes Stock of Toll on Customers from Microsoft’s Service Takedown
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When I tell people what I do for a living, they don’t get it. I mean, they get that I am a marketing manager, but they don’t understand what the company I work for does exactly. “Oh DNS, yeah no.” I often find myself going into a full blown explanation of DNS only to see their
Continue ReadingEarlier today, we released a joint statement with Microsoft announcing the settlement of the unprecedented and overreaching seizure of 23 of our domains. We are thrilled to announce the settlement of this dispute and are excited to return to work connecting our 18 million users to their website and devices.
How did this happen?
On Monday, June 30, 2014, Microsoft obtained a US court order to take control of our most popular domain names used by both our Free and Enhanced Dynamic DNS services. As a result, nearly 5 million hostnames went dark and 1.8 million customer websites and devices became unreachable.
Why did this happen?
Microsoft suspected some of our customers were abusing our service for malicious purposes. However, instead of reporting the malicious activity to our abuse department or law enforcement, Microsoft decided to secretly sue us in civil court.
By filing an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO), No-IP was prevented from having any knowledge of the case or offering any support in stopping malicious activity. Had Microsoft submitted evidence of abuse at any time, No-IP would have taken swift action to validate the claims and ban any accounts that were proven to be malicious. Instead, Microsoft wasted many months while malicious activity continued.
To state this as emphatically as possible — this entire situation could have been avoided if only Microsoft had followed industry standards. A quick email or call to the No-IP abuse team would have removed the abusive hostnames from the No-IP network.
Microsoft cited 22,000 hostnames that were abusive. Out of those 22,000 seized hostnames, the No-IP abuse department found only a fraction of the hostnames to still be active, which means that many had already been banned through our existing abuse procedures.
Microsoft promised the judge they would only block the hostnames alleged to be malicious and would forward all the remaining traffic for the non-abusive hostnames on to No-IP. This did not happen. The Microsoft DNS servers were misconfigured and failed to respond to our usual volume of billions of queries a day.
On July 1 at 6:00 AM, Microsoft claimed to resolve this error and reported that all domains were fully operational.
As depicted below, their claim was false.
Domains begin to be restored
On July 2, immediately after being contacted by No-IP and its attorneys, Microsoft agreed to contact the domain registries and have them return control of the domains to us before the court ordered them to do so. On that day, 22 of the domains were returned to No-IP. On July 3rd, the last domain was returned as well. Service returned to normal for our users within 24 hours of the domains being pointed back at our nameservers. The delay was due to the time it takes for DNS to propagate worldwide.
While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected.
At No-IP, we are firm believers that the Internet should be free and open. We will continue to fight for the rights of our users and our business. Moving forward, we have provisioned a solution that will reduce the risk of domain seizures. We will talk more in-depth about this in the coming days.
A Million…Actually, Many More…Thank Yous
Since 1999, our users have been spreading the word about No-IP and the helpful services that we offer.
From the entire team at No-IP we would like to send a big THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us throughout this crazy journey. Thank you for sticking with us, tweeting/commenting your support and pledging your support to us in the future. We wouldn’t be here today without you!
We would also like to give a big shout out to our amazing attorneys; Ron Green, our local counsel, from Randazza Legal Group and Mark Del Bianco, our attorney, from the Law Office of Mark Del Bianco. Thank you so much!
We hope that Microsoft learned a lesson from this debacle and that in the future they will not seize other companies domains and will use appropriate channels to report abuse.
On Monday, June 30, Microsoft filed a civil suit in a Nevada federal court to disrupt Bladabindi-Jenxcus, a pervasive family of malware that put millions of customers at risk.
Today, both Microsoft Corporation and Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC announce they have reached a settlement in the matter of Microsoft Corporation v. Mutairi, et al.
Microsoft has reviewed the evidence provided by Vitalwerks and enters into the settlement confident that Vitalwerks was not knowingly involved with the subdomains used to support malware. Those spreading the malware abused Vitalwerks’ services.
Microsoft identified malware that had escaped Vitalwerks’ detection. Upon notification and review of the evidence, Vitalwerks took immediate corrective action allowing Microsoft to identify victims of this malware. The parties have agreed to permanently disable Vitalwerks subdomains used to control the malware.
In the process of redirecting traffic to its servers for malware detection, Microsoft acknowledges that a number of Vitalwerks customers were impacted by service outages as a result of a technical error. Microsoft regrets any inconvenience these customers may have experienced.
We would like to give you an update on the Microsoft takedown and announce that ALL of the 23 domains that were seized by Microsoft on June 30 are now back in our control. Please realize that it may take up to 24 hours for the DNS to fully propagate, but everything should be fully functioning within the next day. One of the domains, noip.me, is taking longer to get back online, but it should be fully restored within the next day. Is your service back up? Please send us a tweet and let us know.
We are so sorry for the inconvenience that this takedown has caused our customers. Thank you so much for the support and for sticking with us through the entire process this week. More information surrounding this event will be released within the next few days, so stay tuned.
Again, THANK YOU.
A message from our CEO
As you certainly know by now, on Monday control of our most popular domain names were seized. As a result, millions of hostnames have gone dark and millions of our users have been put out of service.
We have been throwing everything we have at getting you back online with the least possible delay. For legal reasons, we have been restricted from reaching out to you, but we simply cannot stay quiet any longer. We are very close to a resolution and we will update you with more information as soon as we can.
We hear your overwhelming support on social media and would like you to know that we share your frustration. Thank you so much for your support! #FreeNoIP
Dan Durrer
Owner and CEO
Why is this happening?
You can also read our formal response on our blog to comment and share on Facebook and Twitter.
If you do not want to wait for the domains to come back online, you can use this solution to resolve the issues. You can create a new hostname on a domain that has not been seized by Microsoft. The following domains are free and working:
ddns.net
webhop.me
serveminecraft.net
ddnsking.com
onthewifi.com
To create a new hostname, login to your No-IP account and click on the Hosts/Redirects tab. Click “Add a Host”. Type in your hostname and choose one of the working domains.
Have any questions or comments? Please do not hesitate to open a Support Ticket or give us a call at 775.853.1883, but please understand that we are under heavy call/ticket volume and it may take more time than usual to get back to you.
We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages caused by the Microsoft takedown yesterday. No-IP and Microsoft have reached a settlement, and Microsoft will issue a statement acknowledging its errors. Earlier today, Microsoft filed papers in the Nevada case asking the judge to eliminate the injunction as to No-IP and return the hijacked domains to No-IP’s control. We expect that by tomorrow, No-IP’s operations will begin returning to normal. Other provisions of the settlement are confidential, but we can say that we are very pleased and consider ourselves fully vindicated.
There will be no changes in the operation of No-IP.
We were shocked that Microsoft did not contact No-IP to discuss its malware concerns prior to creating such havoc for innocent users. No-IP has a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any of these subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives.
If you do not want to wait for the domains to come back online, you can use this solution to resolve the issues. You can create a new hostname on a domain that has not been seized by Microsoft. The following domains are free and working:
ddns.net
webhop.me
serveminecraft.net
ddnsking.com
onthewifi.com
To create a new hostname, login to your No-IP account and click on the Hosts/Redirects tab, click “Add a Host”. Type in your hostname and choose one of the working domains.
Because of this incident we have put a preventative measure in place that will allow hosts to failover to new domains, if a domain were ever to be seized from our control again.
Have any questions or comments? Please do not hesitate to open a Support Ticket or give us a call at 775.853.1883, but please understand that we are under heavy call/ticket volume and it may take more time than usual to get back to you
We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives.
We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.
Had Microsoft contacted us, we could and would have taken immediate action. Microsoft now claims that it just wants to get us to clean up our act, but its draconian actions have affected millions of innocent Internet users.
Vitalwerks and No-IP 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 use sophisticated filters and we scan our network daily for signs of malicious activity. Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does occasionally fall prey to cyber scammers, spammers, and malware distributors. But this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. We will do our best to resolve this problem quickly.
The list of domains that were affected by this takedown are the following:
3utilities.com
bounceme.net
hopto.org
myftp.biz
myftp.org
myvnc.com
noip.me
no-ip.biz
no-ip.info
no-ip.org
redirectme.net
servebeer.com
serveblog.net
servecounterstrike.com
serveftp.com
servegame.com
servehalflife.com
servehttp.com
servemp3.com
servepics.com
servequake.com
sytes.net
zapto.org
About No-IP
For over 14 years, No-IP has been offering the best and most affordable Dynamic and Managed DNS solutions. Our robust Anycast Network with points of presence in 18 different worldclass facilities across the globe guarantees our 100% Uptime, because let’s face it, there are no upsides to downtime. NoIP is the preferred choice for users on the Internet for dynamic DNS compared to smaller, less reliable alternatives. Our DNS Experts will ensure that your website is fast, reliable and always available.
Contact
Natalie Goguen
Marketing Manager
5905 South Virginia Street, Suite 200
Reno, NV 89502
press@no-ip.com
Support requests will not be answered via email. Please open a support ticket if you need assistance.
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