On the morning of September 11th, 2007, alerted by handlers from the Internet Storm Center, I learned that one Mykhaylo Perebiynis purchased our Bastille Linux domain and is demanding $10,000 to return it to the project. He appears to be in business as a domain squatter. I'll post more information about this soon - refresh this page later today (9/12/07) for more information.

That's the bad news. Now time for the good news and our future plans.

First, the squatter hasn't focused on having a functional website. He isnt hosting any downloads: Trojan horses or otherwise. He seems to just be in it for the money. The Bastille Linux downloads were always hosted at Sourceforge, where they continue to be available.

Second, the lawyers tell me that we shouldnt have trouble getting the domain back. It will take a bit of time, but both legal action and the domain arbitration process should prove effective. We have an existing trademark on the domain dating back to 1999. This will simply take some time.

Third, the real Bastille Linux website has always been available, along with our downloads, via the http://bastille-linux.sourceforge.net site, similar to every other Sourceforge project. This is where the www.Bastille-Linux.org site used to virtual host to, so it's ready and tested. We'll be updating the major software index sites with this URL over the course of the next week.

Now for our future plans.

We're going to take this event as an opportunity. Bastille Linux has been running on two non-Linux platforms for years, Mac OSX and HP-UX. Hewlett Packard packages Bastille by default with HP-UX, integrates it with their installer, and provides technical support to their customers for it. Much like Douglas Adams' increasingly mis-counted Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Bastille Linux is now two non-Linuxes past its name. We've been considering a name change to reflect this for some time. So...

We've purchased the Bastille-UNIX.org domain and will set the Bastille-Linux.org website to transparently forward to the Bastille-UNIX.org website once we get the domain back.

I'll write more soon, but I wanted to get the word out as quickly as possible. Please use the the new domain now:

www.Bastille-UNIX.org

Thank you for all the support, gratitude, and code/idea/testing contributions over the years. I'm optimistic for the future.

Sincerely,

Jay Beale

Project Lead and Original Author, Bastille Linux / Bastille UNIX
Co-Founder and Senior Security Consultant, Intelguardians Network Intelligence, LLC

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