Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Worst registrar Xin Net crackdown requested

analysis
Jun 18, 20082 mins

Garth Bruen of KnujOn recently sent me the following note: Martin, For the reasons detailed in the attached memo I have respectfully recommended to ICANN that the Registrar Xin Net Technology Corporation be issued a Breach Notice and be prevented from registering new domains until they can demonstrate effective compliance. The expediency of this cannot be understated because of the serious public health and safe

Garth Bruen of KnujOn recently sent me the following note:

Martin,

For the reasons detailed in the attached memo I have respectfully recommended to ICANN that the Registrar Xin Net Technology Corporation be issued a Breach Notice and be prevented from registering new domains until they can demonstrate effective compliance. The expediency of this cannot be understated because of the serious public health and safety risk posed by the continued population of fake online pharmacies by Xin Net registrants. For the reasons detailed in this report it would be trivial for Xin Net to control and cease this behavior, but even after being issued enforcement notices by  ICANN these practices have not stopped.

Sincerely, Garth

Attached was a 2 MB PDF memo, which you can download from here.

You may recall from Wall of shame: 10 worst registrars that Xin Net was at the top of KnujOn’s “worst registrar” list.

The gist of the latest KnujOn memo to ICANN is that Xin Net has over the last year

  • hosted over 18,000 illicit domains, advertised in over 1.7 million unsolicited emails, and
  • corrected exactly none of the 11,000 sites reported to ICANN by KnujOn

Even better, many of the illicit sites are fake pharmacies, and they are still active. And better than that, these sites were all registered by a handful of customers.

And, to add insult to injury, Xin Net is still registering 100 new illicit sites a day.

You may recognize some of these subjects from your own junk mail folder:

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I’ll be very interested to see whether ICANN takes action against Xin Net.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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