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Epik
Epik is an American domain registrar and web hosting company known for providing services to alt-tech websites that host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist materials.[1] It has been described as a "safehaven for the extreme right" because of its willingness to provide services to far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.[2][8] Some of Epik's notable former clients include social network Gab and the imageboard website 8chan.[9] In 2021, the Parler social network moved its domain registration to Epik when it was denied hosting and other web services after it was used to help plan the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.[10] Epik has also provided hosting and registrar services to Patriots.win, formerly TheDonald.win, an independent far-right forum that has served as the successor for the r/The_Donald subreddit that was banned in June 2020.[11][12][13] In September and October 2021, hackers identifying themselves as a part of Anonymous released several caches of data obtained from Epik in a large-scale data breach.[14][15][16] In 2023, Epik was acquired by Registered Agents Inc., a company owned by Dan Keen.[17][18] HistoryEpik was founded in Washington in 2009 by Rob Monster, who served as the company's chief executive officer until 2022.[3] In the late 2010s, following a series of acquisitions, Epik also began providing an increasing variety of other web services including web hosting, content delivery network (CDN) services, and DDoS protection.[19][20] Until 2018, Epik primarily focused on domain trading and mostly stayed out of the public spotlight. In 2018, the company came to public attention when they decided to provide services to Gab.[21] Epik is primarily known for its domain name registration services, and, until its ownership change in 2022, described itself as the "Swiss bank of the domain industry".[22] As of January 2022[update], Epik was the 22nd largest domain registrar in the United States and 47th largest globally, as measured by the number of domains registered through the company.[23] In 2021, Epik had 80 employees.[24] In September 2022, Monster stepped down as CEO and installed Brian Royce as his successor.[25][26] After repaying debts to avoid litigation, and amid allegations of financial misconduct by Monster, on June 8, 2023, Epik.com and its associated domain registrar platform were sold to Epik LLC.[27][17] Epik LLC is owned by Registered Agents Inc., a registered agent company beneficially owned by Dan Keen that enables companies to mask their true owners by using fictitious personas.[17][18][28][29] The sale was finalized in January 2024 after ICANN approved the transfer.[30] Epik made changes to its terms of service during the ICANN review that saw the company remove violators and “problematic clients” from its platform.[31] GovernanceEpik board members have included Braden Pollock and Tal Moore.[32][33] Joseph Peterson was Epik's director of operations from 2017 until 2019. Rob Davis serves as senior vice president for strategy and communications.[34] Moore left the board in December 2018, over the company's choice to host Gab.[32] Peterson left the company in 2019, and said that he left shortly after Monster began a company staff meeting by asking employees to watch the video of the Christchurch mosque shootings, which he said would prove to them that the attack had been faked.[34] Pollock had also resigned by Summer 2020, citing ideological differences.[33] AcquisitionsIn February 2019, it was announced that Epik had acquired BitMitigate, an American cybersecurity company based in Vancouver, Washington. BitMitigate protects websites against potential threats including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The company continues to operate as a division of Epik, and BitMitigate's founder Nicholas Lim briefly served as Epik's chief technology officer.[6] Epik acquired web hosting company Sibyl Systems Ltd. in 2019.[35][36][37][better source needed] Sibyl was founded in 2018, and according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was possibly based in Norway or in England.[38][39] Sibyl was known for providing hosting services to Gab, following its termination by its previous web host due to the service's use by the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. In February 2019, the SPLC as a "shadowy operation with little transparency... a murky history of ownership and no fixed base of operations".[39] Termination of services to EpikWhen Epik began providing services to 8chan in August 2019, after the imageboard was taken offline by its host when it was discovered that the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shooting allegedly posted his manifesto on the site, several service providers stopped providing services to Epik. In August 2019, web services company Voxility banned Epik after determining it was hosting 8chan.[40] That same week, Amazon said it was "trying to find out whether any Amazon Web Services infrastructure is indirectly supporting 8chan through Epik," as 8chan's content violated Amazon's Acceptable Use Policy.[41] Epik reported it would no longer provide web hosting services for 8chan due to "the concern of inadequate enforcement and the elevated possibility of violent radicalization on the platform."[41] On August 9, cloud hosting provider Linode informed Epik they would be terminating services to the company.[41] In October 2020, financial services provider PayPal terminated service for Epik due to financial risk concerns.[42] The company didn't define the risks, but Mashable alleged that PayPal's concerns were related to Epic's Masterbucks alternative currency, and that PayPal terminated service because Epik allegedly had not taken the proper legal steps to offer it.[42] Mashable also reported that the termination was partly due to concerns by PayPal that the site was encouraging tax evasion by advertising the "tax advantages" of using Masterbucks.[42][43] Epik subsequently published what Mashable described as "a series of unhinged open letters" targeting "PayPal, Hunter Biden, Bloomberg News, and several Avengers" and accusing PayPal of terminating service because they were biased against conservatives.[43] Data breachOn September 13, 2021, hackers identifying as part of the Anonymous hacktivist group announced they had obtained access to what they called "a decade's worth" of personal data, including all domains ever registered or hosting with the company, account credentials, employee emails and unidentified private keys.[14][44] The 180 gigabytes of data was curated by the Distributed Denial of Secrets group,[45] and included 15 million unique email addresses (of customers and non-customers), scraped from WHOIS records.[14][46][47] Journalists and security researchers subsequently confirmed the veracity of the hack and the types of data that had been exposed.[46][15][22] An engineer performing an impact assessment for an Epik client told The Daily Dot that "They are fully compromised end-to-end ... Maybe the worst I've ever seen in my 20-year career". The data was later confirmed to include approximately 15 million unique email addresses, which belonged both to customers and non-customers whose data had been scraped from WHOIS records.[48] Anonymous released additional data on September 29 and on October 4. The second release contained 300 gigabytes of bootable disk images and API keys for third-party services used by Epik; the third contained additional disk images and data belonging to the Republican Party of Texas, an Epik customer.[49] On September 13, the day the breach was announced and the first portion of data was released, Epik said in statements to news outlets that they were "not aware of any breach".[47][50] When the company did not acknowledge the breach, the attackers vandalized Epik's support website.[15] On September 15, the company sent an email to customers notifying them of "an alleged security incident".[45] Epik CEO Rob Monster confirmed the hack in a September 16 public video conference, which The Daily Dot described as "chaotic and bizarre" and which Le Monde characterized as "possibly one of the strangest responses to a computer security incident in history".[51][22] The company publicly confirmed the breach on September 17, and began emailing customers to inform them on September 19.[48] Services to far-right websitesEpik is known for providing services to websites with far-right content, such as the social network Gab, video hosting service BitChute, and conspiracy theory website InfoWars.[2][7][52] It was described in 2019 by Vice as "a safehaven for the extreme right" and in 2021 by The Seattle Times as "a home for far-right websites" because of its willingness to host far-right websites that have been denied service by other Internet service providers.[2][53][54] In 2021, The Daily Telegraph wrote that Epik was "a safe harbour for websites said to be enabling the spread far-right extremism and carrying Neo-Nazi content";[33] the same year, Fortune called the company the "right wing's best friend online".[10] NPR reported in February 2021 that "when websites flooded with hate speech or harmful disinformation become too radioactive for the Internet, the sites often turn to [Epik] for a lifeline."[21] Epik has provided services for websites, platforms, and groups including Parler, 8chan, Gab, BitChute, Patriots.win, The Daily Stormer, InfoWars, One America News Network, AR15.com, Kiwi Farms, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers.[9] Bobby Allyn writing for NPR has described the websites Epik services: "Spend a few minutes on these sites, conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, vaccines and mass shootings are not hard to find, not to mention a steady stream of bigoted content about Jews, women and people of color."[21] Epik describes itself as a protector of free speech, and its past CEO Rob Monster defended its decisions to host extremist content as being a part of Epik's commitment to "welcome all views, without bias or preference".[7][2] Monster has said he is repudiating "cancel culture" and Big Tech.[21] In May 2019, the Counter Extremism Project's Joshua Fisher-Birch criticized Epik for this stance, saying that, "while Epik portrays this as a noble exercise in anti-censorship, they're making a business decision to continue to amplify voices calling for violence."[2] In February 2021, Michael Edison Hayden of the SPLC said that although hate speech can be found throughout the internet, including on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter, "The difference is there are people with terroristic ambitions plotting out in the open, producing propaganda that they seek to use to kind of encourage violence. And those are the kind of websites Rob Monster is willing to pick up."[21] ParlerIn January 2021, the alt-tech social network Parler transferred its domain name registration to Epik, following the termination of its hosting and support services by other providers on account of it being "overrun" with death threats and celebrations of violence.[67][68] According to Fortune, Epik provided Parler with advice on running the service, including adding moderators, improving systems to detect harmful posts, and changing their terms of service.[10] 8chanOn August 5, 2019, Epik competitor Cloudflare announced that in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting they would no longer be providing services to 8chan, a far-right imageboard known as a location for hateful content and child sexual abuse material,[69][70] which the perpetrator of the shooting had allegedly used immediately prior to the attack to post a manifesto justifying his actions.[71] The same day that 8chan was removed from Cloudflare, Epik began providing hosting services, and Monster released a statement explaining their decision. Later that day, Epik's primary hardware and connectivity provider Voxility banned Epik from renting their server space.[40] Voxility's vice president of business development stated, "We have made the connection that at least two or three of the latest mass shootings in the U.S. were connected with [Epik and BitMitigate]. At some point, somebody needed to make the decision on where the limit is between what is illegal and what is freedom of speech and today it had to be us."[72] The Voxility ban took 8chan offline, along with The Daily Stormer and other Epik customers. On August 6, Epik reversed course and announced that they would not provide hosting services to 8chan; on August 7, Ars Technica noted that Epik had only ceased hosting their content and was still providing 8chan with DNS services.[73][55] GabEpik received media attention in early November 2018 for registering Gab, an American alt-tech social networking service known for its far-right userbase, after it was ousted by GoDaddy for allowing "content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people". This came shortly after it was revealed that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting had used the service to post "hateful content".[3][56][74][75] Tal Moore, a member of Epik's board, resigned in December 2018 over the company's involvement with Gab.[4] On November 7, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro sent a subpoena to Epik requesting "any and all documents which are related in any way to Gab" after Gab registered its domains onto Epik.[76][52] Gab posted screenshots of the subpoena letter in a tweet on the day the subpoena was sent, despite being asked to keep the letter confidential.[76][52] The tweet was deleted hours later.[76][52] In an email statement to Ars Technica, Monster stated that "the news of the subpoena was not intended for public consumption" and that "we are cooperating with their inquiry".[52] Patriots.winEpik provides hosting to Patriots.win, previously known as TheDonald.win, the independent far-right web forum that was created as a successor to the r/The_Donald subreddit banned by Reddit in June 2020.[77][78][11] The website has been labeled "a magnet for extreme discourse" by the Financial Times.[11] It has been likened to other clients of Epik's, Gab and 8chan, as those sites were also created to bypass hate speech policies on more mainstream sites.[79] According to a January 16, 2021 report from the Wall Street Journal, Epik had threatened to take TheDonald.win offline over the forum failing to remove white supremacist, racist, and violent content. The Journal also reported that Jody Williams, TheDonald.win's owner, had received multiple requests from the FBI for user information due to threatening posts. Williams had struggled to moderate the forum's racist, antisemitic, and violent posts over the prior months, and some of TheDonald.win's volunteer moderators had responded by thwarting Williams's efforts to take down the violent and objectionable content on the forum. Williams and his family had also received daily death threats from the users he banned from the forum.[12] On January 20, 2021, due to an internal power struggle over the TheDonald.win domain between the moderators and Williams, a new forum called Patriots.win was created and TheDonald.win was shut down by Williams on January 21.[13][80] As of January 21, 2021[update], Epik was providing services to Patriots.win.[13] The Daily StormerIn August 2019, when Epik discovered newly acquired cybersecurity company BitMitigate was hosting an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website, The Daily Stormer, Epik stopped providing services.[81][82][83][84] BitMitigate had been hosting the site since GoDaddy and Cloudflare terminated services after mocking the death of Heather Heyer at the 2017 Charlottesville car attack.[81][83][84] In a 2021 interview with NPR, Monster said that Epik's connection to The Daily Stormer was "regrettable", and that "The greatest cost of acquiring BitMitigate was not the amount of cash that we paid to buy the technology, but the entanglement."[21] Kiwi FarmsAfter Cloudflare deplatformed the harassment forum Kiwi Farms in November 2022, Epik began providing the website with domain registration services.[19] In January 2024, the new Epik LLC discontinued its registration agreement with Kiwi Farms, citing complaints about child sexual abuse material, doxing, and other terms of service violations.[85][17] Epik claimed on Twitter that it had suspended services to the website after receiving a United States court order, and alleged that the website had been hosting child sexual abuse material. Kiwi Farms responded by threatening Epik with a defamation lawsuit.[17] Lack of response to reports of alleged illegal activityWired wrote in 2018 that Epik had a history of not responding to reports of illegal activity on the websites they registered, which the magazine noted as unusual for domain registrars based in the United States.[5] Pharmaceutical watchdog website LegitScript had reported in 2018 that they alerted Epik to the sale of illegal drugs and counterfeit medications on websites registered by Epik, and that Epik had declined to act upon the information without a court order.[86] Epik's CEO at the time, Rob Monster, responded to LegitScript by pointing out that they do take action on domains when court orders are presented, that they could not reasonably assess all claims of illegality themselves, and that they could not merely take LegitScript's claim that something was illegal as the organization represents corporate pharmacy interests.[87][non-primary source needed] See alsoReferences
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