Nick Bolton loses accreditation for .Au domain name business – Bottle Domains
BrisConnections unit-holders who reckon Nick Bolton earned $4.5million by double-crossing them earlier this week may well be cheered by the news that one of his Australian Style Group’s domain name businesses has lost its official .Au accreditation.
They may now also be not surprised to learn that the business – Bottle Domains - appears to have lied about a recent security audit.
Bottle’s web-site claimed the security audit had earned it compliance with the official Payment Card Industry (PCI) credit-card industry data security standard (DSS).
But Vectra Corp, the company who did the audit, denies the claim.
Mike Ryan, Vectra’s business development manager made that clear
in an emailed response to questions from eCommerce Report about Bottle’s PCI claims.
“I wish to correct references made that Vectra Corporation conducted a PCI DSS Audit of Bottle Domains. Vectra Corporation was engaged by Australian Style Group in February 2009 to
conduct an IT security assessment, not a PCI DSS compliance audit.”
Bottle’s deception may yet prove significant when industry regulator - auDomain Administration (auDA), turns its mind to the question of
whether the other Australian Style Group owned Au Domain registrar – Explorer Domains Pty Ltd, should also lose its accreditation.
If Australian Style lost accreditation for that business as well, the future of its other domain name businesses – DomainCentral.com.au,
Bottle.com.au
and Name.com.au would be in doubt.
Whilst they could still register international domain names, the businesses would certainly lose most of their customers without the ability to register and renew .Au domain names.
Surprisingly, auDA’s announcement released yesterday – 15th April - said that it has terminated Bottle Domains accreditation because of a hitherto unreported security incident back in 2007.
The loss of accreditation was not due to the hack earlier this year which, as we exclusively reported, saw the loss of up to 60,000 customers details, including credit card numbers.
Our exclusive report revealed that not only had the details been lost, they had been offered for sale on a hackers web-site.
Nevertheless, a statement by auDA chief executive, Chris Disspain, posted on the regulator’s web-site, said that it was the failure to report the 2007 incident that breached of its registrar agreement.
“In our view, Bottle Domains’ failure to deal properly with the security incident in April 2007 demonstrated an alarming disregard of the potential risks to its own customers, and to the overall stability and integrity of the Australian DNS.”
“Given the seriousness of the matter, it is appropriate that auDA terminate Bottle Domains’ registrar accreditation.”
Bottle’s 11,000 customers will now have to decide whether to stick with Bolton, via his other auDA accredited registrar businesses, or transfer their names to one of Australia’s 25 other accredited registrars.
In the meantime, auDA has altered the official register to show itself, rather than Bottle as the registrar of record.
auDA has posted information on its web-site advising Bottle Domains customers that they should to transfer their domain names to a new registrar and said that there will be no cost for doing so.
Even so, many Bottle Domains customer will no doubt be confused about the situation, and need help in understanding what they are doing.
Other Australian domain name registrars, such as Larry Bloch's NetRegistry, have already complained about the disruption this will cause.
And the decision to strip an official registrar of its accreditation, which has never happened before in Australia, will also clearly be unsettling to remaining 25 or so registrars.
For more information go to
www.auda.org.au
www.bottledomains.com.au
www.vectra-corp.com.au
www.pcisecuritystandards.org
www.ecommercereport.com.au/story78.php
www.ecommercereport.com.au/story83.php
www.ecommercereport.com.au/story88.php
| 
