Piradius.Net & Shinjiru Hosted Al-Qaeda Terrorist Sites

After moving on from a horrible web hosting experience with Shinjiru we discovered that Piradius.Net has been hosting terrorist websites that have been used by Al-Qaeda to post hit lists of American citizens that they want killed. This discovery came while conducting a media research study on celebrity cyberbullying to populate one of the prototypes with interesting content. Our chief developer was writing one particular Cyberbullying Report on a series of domain names known as Ansar al-Mujahideen located at As-Ansar.info, As-Ansar.com, and As-Ansar.org all of which were full of Arabic hate speech and pictures of Osama Bin Laden. He wanted to give his report some information beyond it being just another obvious cyberbullying incident, so he started doing some WHO IS searches (1) about these domains and remembered seeing the Piradius name listed as a property of Shinjiru Technology in a Motion Picture Association (MPA) press release (2).

To our horror we discovered that we had been doing business with the same company who had been providing services used by Al-Qaeda to make headlines on Fox News, CNN, and Forbes Magazine (3). The Forbes article linked to the Investigative Project on Terrorism (4) which contained a link to one of the then live forum threads (5). To make matters worse we realized that two of our domain names were still technically owned by Shinjiru because we were still using their private domain name registration service. Fearing for the safety of our prototypes we realized that we needed to transfer our domains away from them as soon as possible before we could safely name them in the report, but that still took a couple weeks because after finally getting our EEP codes from Shinjiru employees who asked more questions than we would have liked our first attempts to transfer our domains to their current registrar was unsuccessful due to them being listed in their database as Shinjiru property. This was due to Shinjiru being a reseller of theirs, so we had to ask them again to push the domains to our username after which we realized that by using the private registration of our registrar directly we would save 50% off what Shinjiru was charging us to be the middle man all along.

Today we were happy to see when trying to visit the terrorist websites that they all appear to be down. We don’t know if that is due to poor service from Shinjiru, Shinjiru getting hacked, or Shinjiru doing the right thing by suspending those sites for containing content "that threatens or encourages bodily harm" in violation of Section 5 of their acceptable use policy (AUP) and hosting "forums for terrorists, personal websites for terrorists, audio, photo and videos of terrorist activities” in violation of Section 8 of their AUP (both the Shinjiru AUP(6) and Piradius AUP(7) are virtually identical). We hope that these sites will stay down, but given the headlines they made and the way Piradius is marketed as a premium service we doubt that it took over 2 months for someone to complain about this.

On a separate note realizing the presence of such horribly illegal content on their server helped us look at the horrible service we received (8) in a different light. Now we think that hackers were most likely to blame for a lot of the "urgent maintenance" Shinjiru blamed our downtime on and that those hackers were justified in attacking our former hosting prover for helping people we never want to do business with.

1. http://whois.domaintools.com/as-ansar.com

2. http://mfact.org/Press_Room/press_releases/2008/20080701_PiradiusISPTakedown.pdf

4. http://blogs.forbes.com/abigailesman/2011/06/26/al-qaedas-corporate-hit-list-are-you-a-target-too/

5. http://www.investigativeproject.org/2973/al-qaida-issues-new-mail-bombing-threat

6. http://www.shinjiru.com/aup.html

7. http://www.piradius.net/aup

8. http://nolimitlist.com/opinion/shinjiru-technology-is-horrible-offshore-web-hosting-257