In fact, I appreciate the efforts of the Shadowserver Foundation in depriving Avalanche malware families of their command and control infrastructure by sinkholing the domain names generated by the malware domain generation algorithms. I understand false-positives like this can happen. It comes with the territory. It just sucks that the domain name I was using happened to be a false positive. In this case, it ended well because the Shadowserver Foundation (along with Namecheap) acted quickly on my issue and asked NIXI to have the domain transfer undone.
Having said that, I do believe that you make a very good point. Actions like this should be taken with a lot more care. What if it were not a personal blog but a small business? Depending on the nature of the business, an inadvertent domain transfer like this could have affected the business seriously. The Shadowsecurity Foundation did say that they are improving their processes.
I am not very concerned about this particular foundation when I talk about this. But I am concerned about the systemic issue in the domain name management system that allowed a mistake like this to occur. There could be some type of peer review before a domain transfer like this is executed. I don't think there is a general and popular solution for this problem in the near future. I am hoping that the recent work that is going on in consensus protocols based on cryptography might pave the way to a more decentralized network and more decentralized name management that also become popular and mainstream.
However, if your tweet hadn't gotten traction, and if Namecheap hadn't been proactive, you'd likely have never gotten the domain back. I mean, you had the Namecheap CEO on the case! And for a business losing a domain like that, it'd probably be fatal.
I get that many think that Americans are hugely too litigious. But there is the argument that there ought to be compensation for damages.
You say that "[t]he primary loss I suffered was in terms of time". But arguably your time is worth something. Such as your customary billing rate, times three.
Edit: Or just send them an invoice. At perhaps 50% over your customary billing rate, given that it was a rush job.
That point of view is rather unfortunate. Why does it have to be about damages? GP even ends his comment on a very postitive note about things that would help. Not every mistake needs to be punished. It was a false positive, and it was heartening to see that all the parties acted fast enough. Why not just move on instead of outraging over hypothetical concerns?
EDIT: I have no idea how to quote parent comments here.
What is your source for that?
If someone attacks you, and causes physical or even mental damage, they typically face criminal and/or civil penalties.
That's common, throughout the world.
> Not every mistake needs to be punished.
Maybe so. But the people responsible for the damage could proactively offer compensation. That'd arguably be the honorable and compassionate thing to do.
> It was a false positive, and it was heartening to see that all the parties acted fast enough.
It's clear that they acted recklessly. So it's not just a "false positive". And what's "fast enough"? A few days after a totally implausible attack isn't that fast. It should have been fixed within the day. After at most a few emails.
Wouldn't the legal fees and time spent litigating exceed the winnings?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fe...
But maybe some attorney might do it pro bono.
No, really they aren't. There are a lot of lawyers in America, but most never set foot in a courtroom. They mostly just do "important" paperwork and give advice on following rules.
I know a lawyer who last month wanted to sue someone in federal court, only to discover that Joe Random lawyer is not allowed to file lawsuits in federal court; he had no idea that there was such a thing as a federal trial bar and that membership requires significant experience in federal court under the supervision of a member. He spent a week trying to find anyone that would be willing to file his lawsuit but none would. So he hired a law firm to sue in state court - that is much easier I guess. Anyway, the point is that he is a good lawyer with years of experience doing the lawyer thing, but no experience with litigation. That's normal.
MTAs should queue undeliverable addresses for more than four days, so you may not miss much unless someone’s DNS resolver had a poor caching strategy or Shadowserver used a long TTL. At least the name still resolved (else the mail would have been dropped immediately). Some mass mail senders may go to less effort to get their messages through.
The fact that people responded so “quickly” helped here. I put “quickly” in quotes as it was quick enough to possibly cause no message to be lost — I’m sure it was super stressful and didn’t feel quick at all!
Glad you got your name back.
Microsoft Exchange used to (hope it doesn't still?) cache MX records until the service restarted. :( There's a long tail of braindead software in the DNS space
Have you consulted a lawyer?
It seems that the Shadowsecurity Foundation did act recklessly. But you'd need to prove monetary damages.
But perhaps they'd settle to avoid the hassle.
Edit: This is an admission of guilt:
> He explained in his email that my domain name was sinkholed accidentally as part of their Avalanche operation.