14 DAY TRIAL // EasyDNS, a company wrongfully accused for kicking WikiLeaks out of its network, ended up actually offering DNS hosting and DDoS protection to the whistleblowing organization.
Last week it was widely reported that US-based EveryDNS suspended services for wikileaks.org over fears that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting the domain would destabilize its entire network.
However, some news organizations got the name of the provider wrong and wrote EasyDNS instead, which unlike EveryDNS, is a Canadian company.
The company fought for several days to clear up its name, but it knew that sooner or later people will say: “Fine, it was EveryDNS that dropped WikiLeaks. But why don’t you host it then?”
So last Friday, easyDNS took the bull by the horns and issued an open letter to WikiLeaks in which it laid out some technical conditions required to provide DNS services for the organization.
A day later, part of those conditions were met and easyDNS' nameservers were added to the DNS delegation of wikileaks.ch, the primary fallback domain in the absence of wikileaks.org, which is currently in an uncertain state.
“From the moment this episode started, we just sort of knew that this would be the outcome of events,” wrote Mark Jeftovic, the CEO of easyDNS.
“We did raise quite a stink about being incorrectly named as the DNS provider who unplugged wikileaks, so when faced with the prospect of having them really actually use us for DNS it clearly became a case of ‘put up or shut up.’
“So now we're going to take this on. I feel like we've already ‘done the time’, so we may as well ‘do the crime’,” he added.
The company is prepared to do this even at the cost of business, as at least one customer has already left because he disapproved of its support for WikiLeaks.
Granted, it might also get a lot of new customers because of this decision, especially if the DDoS protection it plans to provide WikiLeaks with, will hold up.
In order to protect its other customers, the wikileaks.* domains serviced by easyDNS, which currently include the .ch and .nl ones, will be confined to a nameserver that features DDoS protection from a company called Prolexic.
This nameserver is actually spread across four servers on the US east and west coasts, in London and in Hong Kong. Requests are routed to them depending on which is nearer.
“We've done this because Prolexic specializes in one thing and one thing only: soaking up DOS attacks. And they do that one thing very very well,” Jeftovic explains.
He also notes that Prolexic, which is a Florida-based company, has been alerted of the possible DDoS attacks coming its way as a result of hosting WikiLeaks.
It will be interesting to see how this situation develops. Back in September the Prolexic CTO was invited to speak at the INTERPOL Cyber Security Event in Hong Kong.