This morning I tried to connect to some devices on my home network remotely only to find that they appeared to be offline. My first thought was that there was an issue with my home Internet connection, but after quick troubleshooting it appeared that all of my no-ip.org subdomains were not resolving.
I logged on to my no-ip account and found a formal statement explaining that Microsoft sized some of the most popular no-ip domain names!
I use no-ip free services to enable easier access to some routers and firewalls on dynamic IP addresses. There is nothing mission critical depending on no-ip, so this was more of an inconvenience than a real issue for me. However, there are lots of people that rely on no-ip much more than I do.
Microsoft also published a blog post on this matter. I normally support Microsoft efforts in fighting malware, but I think this time they went way overboard. One thing is to shut down domains used almost exclusively by malware creators, but in this case no-ip us used my millions and millions of innocent people for completely legitimate purposes. Microsoft statement that "NO-IP ... infrastructure [is] frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims" is pretty ironic when in OS world Microsoft's own Windows hosts vast majority of malware ever created....
01.07.2014
