The Strange Case of the RIAA’s Website

As we have been reporting, the RIAA’s website is one of the most targeted sites on the Internet, the RIAA having made many a hacker friend with its policies toward P2P. So you would think that the RIAA would have a phlanx of security experts running its website – um no:

At the end of January, the RIAA gave responsibilities for the site to a hitherto little-heard-of operation in Rockville, MD called Tomorrow’s Solutions Today, or TST Inc.

The site is run by one Kevin Dziekonski, and the RIAA appears to be his very first live customer.

In this directory listing, Dziekonski describes himself as a “Service Disabled Veteran” and TST as a “Small Disadvantaged Business”.

Before the latest denial of service attack took down the site, TST was running an out-of-the-box edition of Internet Information Server 5.0. It also appears to be run from a residential address – Dziekonski’s home.

After an RIAA outage earlier this month, Dziekonski responded to reporters’ queries by explaining that “the site is hosted in a couple locations and need to have redundant communications between them. The one thing in common they share that cannot be avoided is Verizon.” So the redundancy does, er… not extend to having two hosting companies.

It’s a pleasure to see veterans finding a rewarding life outside the service. The brown cardboard signs at many an urban intersection here show that life outside the service can be tough, and discrimination abounds. [The Register]

The site has been down for over a week, again.