Good news, for once

The Register reports that the providers of anonymous domain registration services LogicBoxes have decided to sever their contractual ties with notorious spammer – VXer haven Estdomains. The move seems motivated by the bad publicity Estdomains have been getting recently. Sites hosted by Estdomains seem to be a constant source of spam and malware, and world+dog is starting to take notice.

 

The move will likely spell the end of at least the shadier side of Estdomains business partnerships, as the firm has given its clients the choice of either de-anonymizing or ging with another registration provider. With “bulletproof” hosting and anonymous domain registration being the lucrative businesses that they are, we expect a new “black-hat” ISP to fill the gap left open by Estdomains in no time at all.

It remains to be seen if the provider can weather what is bound to be a massive hit to their customer base.

The security implications of this event are twofold: on the one hand, it proves that public and legal pressure can work to help clean up the Internet, even if in a slow and unpredictable fashion (scandal has been following Estdomains around since the very beginning of this century). On the other, a very valuable blacklist entry (that for sites hosted by Estdomains, which was an almost sure-fire predictor of malware hosting or spam) is probably going away for good.

Expect anti-spam and anti-phishing solutions that rely heavily on blacklists to suffer in accuracy over the next few months.