Cybersquatting among the ruins

Before the second tower collapsed, the domain name land grab was already underway: From wtccollapse.com to nukeafghanistan.net.

By Bryan Geon

Oct. 1, 2001 | On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, while the twin towers of the World Trade Center crumbled and hijacked jetliners hurtled into the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania, Americans were stricken by shock, anger, grief and grim fascination. Glued to televisions, radios and Internet news sites, many of us were uncertain of what was happening or how we should react. But scores of people around the world reacted decisively to the terrorist attacks, in a peculiar and eerily detached way: They registered Internet domain names commemorating the disaster.

Within moments after the first hijacked plane careered into the World Trade Center's south tower at 8:45 a.m., even as New York firefighters rushed up the stairwells, quick-thinking Net-savvy citizens pointed their browsers to the Web sites of Internet domain name registrars. Jim Burke, of Southington, Conn., was one of the first to react in this way. While learning new Unix commands online, he heard a report that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Without knowing whether the report was true, and almost as a reflex action, he decided to register an appropriate domain name.

"I knew that if I was going to do anything, I was going to have to act fast," Burke says. He wasn't quite fast enough to register his first choice, worldtradecentercrash.com, which had already been taken moments earlier. Instead, he registered the domain name wtccrash.com. The second hijacked plane had not yet struck the south tower.

Over the course of the morning, as new developments were reported, registrants snapped up hundreds of new names, all variations on the same grim themes. The names wtccrash.net and wtccrash.org went quickly, followed by wordier versions like wtcplanecrash.com and tradecentercrash.com. After United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower at 9:03 a.m., plural replaced singular and worldtradecentercrashes.com and wtccrashes.com (nabbed by a registrant in Switzerland) were claimed. When the Pentagon was hit at 9:43 a.m., domain registrars faced a rush on names like pentagonattack.com, pentagondisaster.com and pentagoncrash.com. And then, back in New York, the towers began to fall.

A Canadian registered wtctowercollapse.com, presumably in the 23 minutes between the collapse of the south and north towers of the World Trade Center. Once both towers fell, a flurry of domain name registration burst across the Internet, mimicking, in its own way, the blizzard of dust and smoke surging through lower Manhattan. Registrants pounced on the names tradetowerscollapse.com, twintowerscollapse.com, wtccollapse.com, wtccollapse.net (registered in Korea), wtccrumbles.com and dozens of variants specifically describing the horrific events of the day, along with more broadly descriptive names like wtcsaga.com (registered in Hungary), wtcstory.com, nycdisaster.com and wtctragedy.com.

Once the airlines confirmed the flight numbers of the hijacked planes in the late morning, a slew of names immortalizing the doomed flights came into being.

Next page: Vengeance sweeps the Net: killbinladen.com, and nukeafghanistan.net