Fake Stephen Conroy web site comes and goes in just two days

David Heath
Saturday, 19 December 2009 11:52

Your IT - Home IT

Someone created a fake Stephen Conroy website.  It was 'gone' in just two days!

Reports surfaced yesterday of a phony Stephen Conroy website; which on the face of things was less of the tongue-in-cheek of Leslie Nassar's fake @StephenConroy Twitter account and more of a knife between the ribs at the whole Internet Filtering debacle.

According to the whois database, the site was registered (assuming the last update timestamp represents the actual registration) by a company called Sapia Pty Ltd at around 11pm on December 17th.  The SMH report was published around noon yesterday.  Today the site is unavailable and the whois record has it marked "pendingDelete (Client requested policy delete)."  DNS records show that it was hosted by a Melbourne-based site-hosting organisation.

Sapia Pty Ltd is a very young company, according to ASIC, application for registration of the North Melbourne company was only lodged on October 31st this year.

Exploring a variety of discussions forums, the site appears to have been ‘turned off‘ late yesterday (Friday), being visible around 1pm but gone at 5pm.  Another poster notes the lake of notice given by AuDA.  The poster also notes that the site has been re-incarnated here.  Generally, such a deregistration / removal process takes a few weeks, so the unseemly haste (around 3 hours) ought to raise many eyebrows in the Internet community.

Although deleted, iTWire has seen the content of the original site and can confirm that the new site is essentially identical.

Stephen-conroy.com was registered on December 18th in the name of PrivacyProtect, a Netherlands-based anonymous domain registration organisation.  Oddly, the site is registered via Australian Style, which is part of the same Nicholas Bolton-controlled group of companies as Bottle Domains – the registrar of the site host.  Almost certainly a coincidence.  The site is still hosted at the same location.

A note at the top of the new site states, with some anger, "auDA, the .au Domain Administrator is trying to take us offline. Earlier today they issued a notice giving us 3 hours to provide evidence of our eligibility to hold the 'stephenconroy.com.au' and related domain names. Normally registrants are provided with approximately one week to provide this information on request. We asked for reasonable time to prepare and submit representations on our eligibility but auDA refused to grant this. Accordingly we've moved the site to 'stephen-conroy.com' - please update your bookmarks. Conroy's office must have been busy this afternoon!" 

A full summary of the exchange between Sapia and auDA is available here.

Another small amusement, and one that this author was sorely tempted to take up.  An advertiser on the whois site was offering the available domain "PopeStephenConroy.com."  Hold me back!