End of an epoch: CastleCops closed

pogue,

Thanks for the links and info. One of my main uses of CC was SIRT, MIRT and PIRT. I was disappointed to see that go away the most. Seems as if I will need to use those alternatives.

This is probably a coincidence and really more to do with the holidays. The number of trash e-mails I have been getting has markedly increased since CC closed. At least that is my observation.

 

There is a wiki being rebuilt at battlespam.info. The "all-pages" list is at http://wiki.battlespam.info/index.php/Special:AllPages

Any one who wants to grab a page and start formatting is welcome to help, as they are just copies of the cached html, and there are a lot of internal links to castlecops. Some of them need to be changed to the new wiki's base URL, and some need to remain mentions of CC. And unfortunately, as CC dwindled away over the last year, a lot of the wiki information was not kept up to date, either. So it's not just going to be a mirror of the old pages. It would totally rock to get some of the people who created the originals back involved. (As long as you promise to stop flaming each other. )

The spam forums have moved to the KS forums. Those will be going public within the next week or so. No one has recreated the *IRT's yet, though there are plenty of people conspiring to do it.

 

Thanks for the link, AC - nice to see you here!

trobbins sent me a PM with the link, and just when I started reading it, CC went down on me. I remembered the 'battlespam' portion, but not the TLD...

Hopefully bits and pieces of CC will be rebuilt elsewhere over time, and also hopefully the great CC community will regroup somewhere to continue their fight against cybercrime.

P.S. [removed-pw]

 

CastleCops assimilated by the Borg. Say it aint so.

I did frequent their Malware and Prevention pages and check out the list of freeware apps. They were a useful resource. I learned how to DL, install, update, mount and scan with Antivir on Linux because of CC.

 

I don't believe the conspiracy theories about Paul being paid to kill CC. And I don't believe they're out for a fast buck -- I'm sure that just like SiteAdvisor, Blogger, HijackThis, etc., there would be no problem finding a commercial entity to pay for the site if one didn't put any restrictions on how that entity could commercialize CC in the future. But if I were Paul or Robin and heard people even entertaining that sort of belief about me, I'd feel like killing CC just to get back at those people.

The fact is that CC costs money, even if the content is hosted elsewhere. We all said any kind of thing we wanted about almost anything in the forums. In the US, spammers, sleazy businesses and even just prominent people who don't like to be called things like "butthead astronomers" like to file lawsuits to try to silence critics -- they know they can't win, but they know that the average person doesn't have money laying around to pay lawyers to get the suits thrown out. And the US courts almost never will rule that a lawsuit was so frivolous that it should never have been filed at all. So a site like CC and the owners who would be named in any lawsuits need liability insurance, even if hosting is free, even if the site is just in archive. Who's going to pay for that?

 

I don't know if this would make any difference or be of use to anyone, but I managed to get a hold of CastleCops's robots.txt file as well as their 8 sitemaps. If you would like a link, pm me.

 

What about the theories that CC was a research project or government sting to collect a dB of pr0n traffickers.
Develop unique infections they can track to specific individuals when help is sought.

Operation: Smut Fraud

 

KS Forums are now public again!

http://ksforum.inboxrevenge.com/index.php

Most of the antispam volunteers from Castlecops are over there.

 

Thanks for the link, AC

 

What happened to CC exactly? DDoS attacks?

 

That didn't help, but it came down to not wanting to give up any control over running the site even after both owners had resigned.

 

Thanks for everything CastleCops,

hitbit

 

Really sad castlecops closed down. Hope they will continue their infamous pc info web on other domain.

 

Hi everyone.

I am a wanderer looking for a new home. I was a moderator on Blue Security, then was on staff at Castle Cops.

My home base is websplasher.com.

Sorry, I don't have any real information about the exact reasons that it closed. I know that the DDoS protection was expensive and that CCSP was pretty much a full-time activity for Paul and Robin.

Thanks for saving the Wiki, as was noted, a lot of very valuable information was contained in CCSP and hopefully a good portion of it can be saved.

 

I just found out about this now when I went to look for some good recommendations for antivirus software and stuff. I always trusted them as a pillar of the security community. They will be missed, I hope the people who went there gravitate out and identify themselves and strengthen remaining communities like this one.

One thing... even if the site is shut down, can't he give out the forum/wiki archives to some other site to host? I'm sure lots would be willing to do it.

This is great! Better than the google links because unfortunately I tried them and they don't work anymore. It looks like the only options now are the WayBack machine in terms of getting what used to be there eh?