Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-)
Also check out Neustar website, the competitor to Verisign.
This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did.
I suppose I could rant why Verisign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message.
Nevertheless, I am sure the folks in Verisign will react to this quickly.
The first would obviously fixing their own registration rules – if a student in UK can do this, this isn’t a good sign for them. Hopefully the fix will be consistent with the ICANN Guidelines :-) [btw, despite my rants against Verisign, I actually like the people work for Verisign – I still have friends (i hope) working there who is doing their best to do good things]
The second is how to deal with the parody site – Verisign isn’t know to have a great sense of humor so I fear for my friend – I taken the liberty to speak to Wendy from EFF just in case. IANAL but the only thing I could see Verisign has a case on is the domain name itself (verisign.com) which is their trademark. The rest of the site have been made clear it is a parody – adapted from Neustar, who apparently have a great time laughing at the parody – or modified from Verisign in such a way no one would be ‘reasonably’ confused.
I suppose they could initiate a takedown notice under DMCA. But that would be interesting – how do you initiate a takedown notice on yourself :-)
They could get their army of lawyers to send threatening letters to Rischard to take it down – but that would only be PR disaster for them and would further attract more attention to the site.
Or alternatively, they could just send a polite email to Rischard to ask him to take it down – Rischard is doing this for a laugh, not looking for a fight so he might afterall.
