Microsoft Takedown Of Domains Owned by No-IP

***** LATEST UPDATE – July 4th, 2014 *****

We would like to update that the 23 domains that were seized by Microsoft has been returned to No-IP ! 

However, as time is needed for the DNS to fully propagate, please allow up to 24 hours for your sub-domains to be fully functional again.

For more information, please refer to No-IP’s blog at http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/07/03/update-microsoft-takedown/

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We were surprised to receive a couple of calls from our customers this morning, all of which are using dynamic IP broadband or fibre plans from their respective ISPs. These customers have called and all of which are due to the same reason:

They are unable to access their remote devices, including their servers, printers, CCTVs and many others.

When we test with our office systems, we have no problem accessing them, and pinging the devices also yield positive results. And yet, when we remote access to our customers’ system, they are not as lucky as us.

Upon further investigations with our different systems, some of which are located geographically far apart and in different countries, it seems that those devices which has their DNS pointing to Google’s DNS server, namely google-public-dns-a.google.com (8.8.8.8) and google-public-dns-b.google.com (8.8.4.4), are unable to ping nor locate the subdomains using the Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) provided by No-IP.com

It seems that Google’s DNS server has refused or unable to reply when comes to these domains and subdomains. In total, about 23 domains were affected.

In the end, we managed to find out the reason and it is NOT because of any technical issue. For that would be rather easy and fast to resolve by No-IP or Google itself.

The reason is because Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 23 of No-IP most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware.

To aggravate the matter, Microsoft did not bothered to contact nor ask No-IP to block these subdomains, and that’s despite the fact that No-IP and Microsoft have an open line of communications between their corporate executives!

As it is of now, Microsoft claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from No-IP customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.

To summarise, this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. Not at all !!

For the time being, we have managed to inform our customers to either purchase the DDNS from No-IP and use their other domains which are not affected, or to move some of our customers to use the services from DynDNS, which cost a little more. Those that prefers to use the free services from No-IP will have to content with accessing their remote devices via IP addresses instead of DDNS, and pray hard that their ISP do not change their IP addresses during these period of time.

To read more about the statement from No-IP, please visit their blog at http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/06/30/ips-formal-statement-microsoft-takedown/