Posted on February 20th, 2012
JotForm is back online on Friday after being taken down as part of a US Secret Service investigation
The form building website, JotForm is back it seems. After being the recipient of a major unprecedented takedown by the US Secret Service, the website has returned online.
According to a report by Ars Technica, the domain registrar for the company, GoDaddy had proceeded to forward the website’s nameservers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. It is suspected that this course of action was taken without the required court order. The website’s forms experienced rapid meltdown by the attack, which compelled the web masters to transfer their site to Hover and NameCheap.
GoDaddy already lost credit with many of its clients for supporting SOPA and for its blatantly chauvinistic Super Bowl commercials. It’s compliance with US authorities to seize hold of one of its customers’ websites has led many to fear the long arm of the law in matters of the Internet. However, without the proper court warrant, many web hosts will stand behind their clients to protect their privacy to the best of their ability.
However, according to Ars Technica, Go Daddy allowed the law to take action against JotForm in order to curtail any problems client websites might incur on its servers. An anonymous agent has confirmed that the web host is currently taking part in their investigation, but could not corroborate whether they managed to acquire a court order for the case or not.
Aytekin Tank, JotForm’s former co-founder, has claimed that the website is completely innocent of all charges leveled against it. However, he revealed that a phishing form might have instigated the accusations and subsequent takedown of the site, even though JotForm has a filter to prevent client personal data from being stolen.
Additionally, Tank also revealed that they had managed to eradicate 65,000 phishing accounts in 2011, but also postulated that it is still difficult to examine each and every account. This can enable almost any site that utilizes publically generated content, to be overlooked.