North American Network Operators Group

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Re: GoDaddy.com shuts down entire data center?

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Tue Jan 17 02:10:41 2006

On Jan 17, 2006, at 1:32 AM, Jim Popovitch wrote:

I want to say, from an outsider's perspective, that I whole heartily applaud GoDaddy on the actions they took [...]
There seems to be a wide split on this topic. I was wondering if people would privately tell me yes or no on a few questions so I can understand the issue better.

1) Do you think it is acceptable to cause any collateral damage to innocent bystanders if it will stop network abuse?

2) If yes, do you still think it is acceptable to take down 100s of innocent bystanders because one customer of a provider is misbehaving?

3) If yes, do you still think it is acceptable if the "misbehaving" customer is not intentionally misbehaving - i.e. they've been hacked?

3) If yes, do you still think it is acceptable if the collateral damage (taking out 100s of innocent businesses) doesn't actually stop the spam run / DoS attack / etc.?


These are important question to me, and I'm surprised at the number of people who seem to feel so very differently than I thought they would feel - than I personally feel. Would people mind sending me private e-mails with yes/no answers? Longer answers are welcome, but yes/no will do.


Using the case under discussion as an example, I am wondering why anyone thinks taking down 100s of innocent domains is a good way to stop a single hacked machine from doing whatever it is doing? If you somehow think all that is worth it, take a close look at your cost / benefit analysis. At this rate, every business on the Internet will be out of business before we take out even a single moderately large botnet.

I am also wondering why anyone thinks the miscreant will stop just because the legitimate owner's domain no longer resolves? Not only is the machine likely to continue sending spam as if nothing happened, we aren't even "catching" the guy. I guess you could say "well, it put pressure on his hosting provider to clean the infected machine", which is true. I just think that's a bit silly. But maybe I'm the one who's silly.


Lastly, I wonder what "average" people - people who run businesses on hosting providers who really don't understand all this computer stuff - think about such actions. How many 100s of people have we just alienated for life to stop - er, NOT stop - a single zombie? And how many of their friends are going to hear over an over how the Internet is not a real business and no one should put any faith in it?

Is this really a good thing?

--
TTFN,
patrick