US.com and UK.com Domains Feel A Microsoft Wrath

Havent blogged for a while but I thought this newsworthy enough to come out of my self imposed exile.

Anyone familiar the US.com and UK.com domain names will know that the owners, UK based Centralnic, sell sub domains of these TLD’s as domains in their own right. Earlier today however (and up to and including the time Im writing this), anyone attempting to visit ANY of the 2.5m sub domains indexed using the Internet Explorer browser will have been presented with the following warning message-

This is a reported phishing website

Internet Explorer has determined that this is a reported phishing website. Phishing websites impersonate other sites and attempt to trick you into revealing personal or financial information.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.

Remember this is for every single UK.com and US.com domain – including some of the large institutions who use these sub domains as their main web presence.

Centralnic have this to say about the issue on their website:

We have been made aware that the Microsoft SmartScreen® filter included with Internet Explorer 8 is erroneously marking some domain names as being unsafe. The most likely explanation is that a genuinely unsafe website under one of our suffixes was reported to Microsoft, but they incorrectly added all the domains under that suffix to their list of unsafe websites.

If you are a domain registrant whose website is affected, you can click on the “More information” link, then the “Report that this site does not contain threats” link, and report that your website is safe to Microsoft.

We are currently working with Microsoft to resolve this issue as quickly as we can. CentralNic will continue to do everything we can to protect our customer’s interests, and we apologise for any inconvenience or distress this issue may cause.

If you have any questions about this matter, please feel free to get in touch.

As ridiculous as it might be for MS to mark each and every sub domain as a bad apple when probably what happened is only one or even just a small handful were reported to Microsoft as being dodgy websites, what it does highlight however is how fragile the sub domain market is and can be. Those familiar with sub domains will remember the web.com story where the sub domain owners got told that the ability to use a web.com sub domain as their website was to end – “though thanks for all the backlinks and traffic you created”. Wave one of the sub domain bad PR wagon.

Im not sure how this latest scenario will play out and even whether Microsoft will reinstate or lift the warning. In any respect the future of the Centralnic sub domains has taken a huge reputation smack across the legs and it will be interesting to see if or how soon confidence returns.

Popcorn at the ready..

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