Google boots Infosecsellout

One of this year’s strangest security stories has come to an appropriately bizarre conclusion.

Google has given the boot to the anonymous blogger (or bloggers) known as Infosecsellout, claiming terms of service violation.

The blog had been silent for several weeks, after all of its archive material was abruptly pulled in mid-July, just after the blogger claimed to have discovered a serious flaw in Mac OS X.

The blog had been pretty widely read for its biting and sometimes pretty funny observations on the state of computer security research, and there was a lot of speculation in the security research community about who exactly may have been behind the blog.

Some thought that Infosecsellout was a legitimate researcher who’d been told by his employer to kill the blog.

We may never know the whole story, though. Earlier this week someone started filling up the blog with adult-themed Web spam. (You can view the blog here, but trust me this is not workplace-appropriate material)

I asked Infosec sellout what was up? Ironically, he said it was a Google terms of service violation that brought the blog down. “Google pulled it due to a TOS violation but has never bothered to let us know what we did or why,” he said via email.

Google typically puts Blogspot domains back in circulation shortly after pulling them for such violations.

I asked Infosecsellout  (via e-mail of course) if  he — or they — were going to blog again. The answer, “Probably.  Working on getting the original one back again or will just register our own domain and cut out the middlemen”

UPDATE — August 20

They’re back, at a new blogspot address. Why use blogspot again if there was a terms of serivce problem? Why is one of their posters trapped in Jamaica? What happened to that Mac flaw they were talking about? I guess we’ll have to sit back and wait for answers now… or perhaps just more questions. 🙂

–Robert McMillan