Nominet nobbles Oz fraudsters

Nominet has won another legal victory in Australia against two men it accused of hacking into its database of .uk names.

The .uk internet domain name registry has now obtained an Australian Federal Court order to freeze the assets and bank accounts of Bradley Norrish and Chesley Rafferty, the individuals behind the UK Internet Registry scam.

The order prevents the defendants from moving their assets out of Australia or transferring them to third parties to avoid judgment.

Nominet began the case in June 2004 after it discovered that data mining had been used to harvest the names and addresses of .uk domain name holders held in its Whois database. This database is commonly used by internet users to check who is the registrant of a domain name.

The sheer scale of these assaults subsequently forced Nominet to suspend its Whois system for the only time in its six-year history. The attacks captured details of many .uk domain name holders and resulted in 50,000 registrants receiving misleading notices from a company calling itself UK Internet Registry regarding their domain name registrations.

Australian high court judge, Justice French found that Mr Norrish had authorised copyright infringement and was involved in misleading or deceptive conduct. "It lies beyond the limits of credulity to suppose that Mr Norrish ... had no idea of [what was going on]," he said.

He went on to describe the notices sent by UK Internet Registry as "nothing less than deceitful".

The next step in the case is a hearing to determine the level of damages that the defendants must pay to Nominet for breaching copyright of the .uk WHOIS database.