February 27, 2010 by sharky
October 1st, 2009
ZeroSec.ws was listed as ‘for sale’ on Flippa.com on October 1st, 2009 - and just five days later they had solidified a buyer, confirming the transaction. The sale was a private one, so no further details were available. Minimum bids were not disclosed, nor was the asking price, and the final purchase price that was settled on will likely never be known. But on October 6th, ZeroSec had a new owner.
When an owner sells or transfers a high-profile website or domain (such as ZeroSec), it’s reasonable to expect the original owner to agree to assume a degree of responsibility to maintain the site’s operations for a predetermined amount of time (this is often a stipulation within terms agreed upon between both parties as a part of the transaction - consider it a ’smooth’ transition period). Usually this is anywhere from 1-3 months but it all depends on the site, and of course, to the conditions in the agreement.
On January 5th, exactly three months after the sale, ZeroSec was relocated to a new server in the US on different hosting. This is also when ZeroSec’s PreDB stopped indexing new pres.
January 16th, 2010
The new owner began to incorporate an entirely different ad-campaign, most notably a captcha-style malicious advert that asked readers to enter his/her cell-phone number. This ad in particular is completely unacceptable for such a renowned & prolific site such as ZS, and was likely the crux, the true turning point in which ZS had lost all credibility among viewership and staff/editors alike. Readers who fell for it would need to cancel the service not once, but twice, or else were charged $9.95. The SMS numbers are reportedly coming from 94374 and 1111487101.
ZS staff have openly speculated that the main reason for the new owner to purchase ZS was based upon being able to put up this advert in the first place. There’s not much doubt that the new owner would be able to recover most, if not all, of his initial investment based on this one small (but highly profitable) advert alone - and it’s not unreasonable to assume that thousands of readers were tricked. You see, folks; buying ZS had little to do with maintaining a successful release blog - it was all about the money. ZeroSec had embarked on an irreparable downward spiral, and ReeGed saw the writing on the wall.
January 19th, 2010
Some 3½ months after the sale, ReeGed officially announced it on ZeroSec’s forums on January 19th. Although prior to this announcement (in which staff & editors were not informed about previously), there had indeed been plenty of internal speculation. The server move and failing PreDB were clear indicators that something was awry; not to mention the shifty ads. But it all could have been a relatively seamless migration if only the new owners were competent to begin with. Or else had a proper agenda for ZS’s future.
February 12th, 2010
All hell was beginning to break loose. Most of the old editors had already abandoned ship. One editor that remained was sc0rff who made an announcement on ZeroSec’s main page (on February 13th) that the site had been sold - the post was entitled "Well, it’s been fun…". This post was removed by the new owner, but can still be viewed here. To this date there is still a 10 day gap of missing posts from 02-12-2010 to 02-22-2010:
February 19th, 2010
However, before editors began their exodus, they decided to delete their own (and each others) previous posts, which numbered in the thousands. For a short period of time, visitors to ZS would notice that the newest article was from July 2009. The new owner had little choice but to do a site rollback to an earlier database (from Feb 2010) thus to be able to reverse all of the deleted posts. Remaining editors were either disabled, or else had their account privileges limited in order to prevent something like this from happening again. On February 20th, ZS successfully used a backup to restore the site, and it was then that the new owner would emerge from the shadows.
February 20th, 2010
After remaining in the background for nearly 5 months with no direct communication to staff (other than with ReeGed prior to his announcement & subsequent removal from ZS), the new owner finally emerged on or about February 20th on ZeroSec’s IRC, long after the problems began to arise.
In this IRC chat, staff vehemently voiced their displeasure towards the direction that ZS was headed. We won’t disclose the transcription of that little chat, but it was clearly the final straw for anyone associated with ZeroSec.
Incompetent ZS Owners…
In the Wordpress backend, ZeroSec has a "Release Box" where new articles are temporarily posted so that editors can ‘grab’ them and commence work. The new owner obviously doesn’t grasp this concept well and assumed ZS had an automated process for posting, and he even attempted to add links directly from RlsLog.net as seen below.
Other examples that pertain to the ZS backend problems can be seen here, here & here.
With no editors, ZS began to copy/paste articles directly from RlsLog with the only discernible difference being the affiliate links in each. Clearly, this is yet another example of how not to run a release blog.
There are no comments in ZS articles at the moment, mostly this can be attributed to a global boycott from editors, viewers and professional uploaders. There are new editors now (all are Indian names, btw), but they don’t actually exist and were created by the new owner (for the purpose of appearing as though they have editors, when they don’t).
Also, we found a very interesting HotFile package that contains 17 screenshots taken from the WP backend of ZeroSec. These are comments that have either been deleted from ZS, or ones that are being held in moderation. Either way, these will never make it to the site publicly:
http://hotfile.com/dl/30336236/29b9d59/comments_edited.rar.html
We suspect we know who the actual owner of ZeroSec is now, as do ex-staff. But the point is a moot one; since ZS is not expected to exist for much longer anyways.
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