Statement on 'PCCF and the "BIND Survey"'

David R. Conrad David_Conrad at iengines.com
Wed Nov 3 20:35:20 UTC 1999


[Apologies for duplicates -- having to do a bit of firefighting here]

Hi,

Recently, a group of individuals calling themselves the "Planet Communications &
Computing Facility" (PCCF) sent mass unsolicited electronic mail to the point of
contact e-mail address listed in the SOA records of (apparently) every zone they
could reach claiming (in part):

	"We conduct and maintain the BIND (Berkley Internet Name Daemon) 
	survey databases."

and stating or inferring their Canadian-based organization (with a domain
creation date of 1999 as documented in their whois record) has for "years" been
"assisting the United States Government and the Department of Defense" in
closing "security holes" in the DNS infrastructure.

As a result of their mass unsolicited e-mail that implies an association with
BIND, ISC has received numerous questions about PCCF, their motives, methods,
and intentions.  In addition, several individuals have lodged "spam" complaints
and questioned whether ISC has taken part in, sponsored, or otherwise supports
"the PCCF spam".

For the record:

- PCCF has _no_ relation whatsoever with ISC, we don't know who these 
  people are, what they are trying to do, why they are trying to do
  it, or whether they can be trusted;

- PCCF has _no_ connection with BIND other than (presumably) using 
  BIND as their DNS server, they are not an ISC support customer or 
  contributor, nor have we (to my knowledge) received any bug 
  reports or other constructive information on DNS security from them;

- the PCCF "survey" which purports to identify DNS vulnerabilities is 
  _completely_ unrelated to the joint ISC / Network Wizard Domain 
  Name survey which merely counts domains and has done so since 1991
  as a metric of Internet growth (see http://www.isc.org/survey.html
  for details);

- ISC strongly agrees with the IAB statement regarding the necessity
  of a single domain name system root and disagrees with the PCCF
  political characterization of ICANN at the end of their mass 
  mailing;

- ISC does not support "spam" in anyway and we nominate spamming 
  organizations to the RBL (see http://mail-abuse.org);

and 

- BIND stands for "Berkeley Internet Name Domain" (according to the 
  original authors) not "Berkley Internet Name Daemon".

Any complaints, flames, etc. regarding the PCCF "survey" should be sent to Joe
Baptista <baptista at pccf.net>, NOT to the Internet Software Consortium.

Speaking personally, while I think a survey of the security of domain name
servers could be of value, I am highly skeptical of the claims PCCF has made and
strongly suspect the individuals involved are merely using their "survey" as an
attempt to justify spamming their position on ICANN to every SOA contact in the
DNS for political reasons.

Regards,
-drc
Executive Director, Internet Software Consortium


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