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Swiss Domain Registry Switch threatening to disable wikileaks.ch

The Pirate Party of Switzerland owns the domain wikileaks.ch. This site is not operated by the Pirates, but rather directs to the servers of wikileaks.org. Last Friday the Pirate Party of Switzerland informed the Wikileaks team that the Swiss domain registry Switch had detected malware under that domain and was threating to disable it. Wikileaks has not yet reacted to that message.

Contrary to the information provided by Switch, no drive-by infection is present on wikileaks.ch. A drive-by can infect a computer even when the URL is only viewed in the browser without any explicit download. The malware served by Wikileaks is instead wrapped in a zip file attached to an email provided for download. No danger is therefore present execept if one were to download the mail, open it in a mail client, decompress the attached zip and run the content.

Stefan Thöni and Giuillaume Saouli, Co-Presidents of the Pirate Party of Switzerland have made the following statement: “At a time when Wikileaks is the target of renewed attacks, we don’t know what angers us more: That Switch wants to censor a domain for serving a malware that’s only dangerous when installed voluntarily, or that Wikileaks is unable to react to problems in a timely fashion.”

The Swiss Pirate Party is proud of its long lasting support for Wikileaks, and it would be upset to learn that access to this website would be disrupted.