More shameless remarks by Larko

Web criminals in Berlin still in business

A week ago I wrote about a bold theft of my blog content. A couple of days later it looked like the thieves had taken down their page http://dogstrike.net/view.php?id=102481 but it was up again as I checked a moment ago. It very much looks to me like all of the site dogstrike.net consists of stolen posts from diffferent blogs in WordPress.com.

Looking at the WHOIS records of that site reveals that it very much looks like the domain has been registered with fake information. As far as I know, there is no Lenin Street in Istanbul and the phone number of the alleged registrant, who is supposed to be based in a non existing address in Istanbul, is Russian. The same goes for administrative, technical and billing contacts.

Interestingly, the same WHOIS lookup shows that the domain has been registered by KLIK MEDIA GMBH, a Berlin based business that Spamhuntress delivers interesting information about. They have been known to register regular spam sites but it now looks like they have also entered the business of stealing blog contents from bloggers like you and me.

Registering a web domain under so obviously fake coordinates as is the case with dogstrike.net is difficult unless the registrar plays along in the game. An honest registrar would have the interest of having the correct details. How else can they be sure that they are going to get their bills paid? The obvious answer is that they can not unless they are behind the site with fake initials themselves.

I know that there is no 100 % working way to get this sort of thieves out of business but I also know that their life can be made a bit more difficult. Therefore, my suggestion to the WordPress.com team is to have a look at the traffic from certain domains and IP’s and put up some blocks to make it that much more difficult to steal the contents of blogs hosted by WordPress.com.

And my suggestion to Staatsanwaltschaft Berlin is to investigate the background and business practice of this KLIK Media GmbH, Alt-Karow 3, 13125 Berlin, tel +49 30 9441 3291. I bet a thorough investigation would uncover interesting details for the prosecutors to work upon.