Wednesday afternoon, the PacketStorm Security site
(packetstorm.harvard.edu) was abruptly shut down with little warning.
PacketStorm was one of the largest and most respected sites catering to
security professionals worldwide. Boasting an average of 400,000 hits a
day, pushing out roughly 10 gigs of traffic, the site was a valuable
resource to an estimated 10,000 security professionals world wide.
This major security resource did not suffer at the hands of hackers,
crackers,
network intruders, or cyber terrorists. Instead, a new kind of
malicious bad guy found
success through a fear that haunts more and more Americans today.
A single piece of email from John
Vranesevich (founder of AntiOnline) to the university hosting
Packetstorm requested that the site
be shut down. This email claimed that PacketStorm was hosting
potentially libelous material about John Vranesevich. Like most US
institutions, the idea of being taken to
court for any reason is enough to scare them into hasty action. With
that
mail, Harvard University pulled the plug.
Email from Ken Williams, primary administrator for the site, indicated
that not only did Harvard shut down the site, they denied him access
to the machine and all information stored on it. The correspondence
noted the likelihood that all information on the machine, and all
backups would be destroyed in order to avoid any sort of legal fallout
from AntiOnline.
"All of the content and the backups made are either destroyed, being
destroyed now, or will be before I can do anything to prevent it." said
PacketStorm founder Ken Williams.
Williams went on to say that he does not fear any fraudulent lawsuit
Vranesevich could attempt to level at him. The information contained
on the site regarding Vranesevich was not in violation of any US law
that he was aware of, and had been there for over a year. Along with
the security site, months of William's own school work was lost.
"I have just lost seven weeks of [class] work and data that cannot be
replaced in 4 weeks." Williams said, referring to deadlines on the
school work.
"What bothers me the most is that all of the
countless hours I put into that web site and
the archives, thousands of hours, are gone
now, for good."
- Ken Williams, PacketStorm founder
These vague and unfounded accusations only serve to hurt the security
community. AntiOnline's mission statement claims they exist "to educate
the public on computer security related issues." Apparently, this
mission statement forgot to include such things like "educate the
public
through OUR site only" or "as long as we profit from it".
So now what? Ken is fearing for his job, and wonders if he will be able
to finish school with his schoolwork missing. Numerous offers of
alternate host sites have been made to Ken Williams but it is unlikely
that there is data available to put on such a site due to Harvard
Universities hasty actions.
For examples of the 'libelous' material hosted on the Packet Storm
site see attrition.org
Ken Williams was kind
enough to provide his thoughts on this sordid mess.
Email from Ken Williams
We attempted to contact John
Vranesevich for comment but he did not respond to our email. We
also attempted to contact AntiOnline's ISP and have received no reply.
John Vranesevich has posted his
version of events on his site.
Comments
from John Vranesevich
Oh, yeah, AntiOnline considers HNN evil and blocks links from HNN to
his web site. We assume that he doesn't want people to read both sides
of the issue.
Late Update: 14:50EST
This is fast developing story and we have not had time to confirm all
statements below.
AntiOnline is currently offline. It is unknown if this was done due to
a descision by John Vranesevich,
his ISP, or if some
other action has been taken. HNN has offered to host AntiOnlines
comments but we have not received a response.
We have word that the PacketStorm site has not been deleted and that
Harvard University will be supplying Ken Williams with a back up
copy of the site.
HNN has received numerous emails condeming John Vranesevich and his actions.
We have received no emails supporting them. We will try to post
some of the better ones if we have time.
Late Update: 17:10EST
Harvard University has released a short statement concerning this
situation.
Harvard University Statement
