Turmoil at HavenCo

Following a wave of publicity upon its launch in 2000, HavenCo became the most famous (or infamous) colocation facility in the world. Now the company, formed to host secure sites on an old gun platform in the English Channel, may be facing a financial crisis. Ryan Lackey, the former chief technical officer for HavenCo, says the company is nearing financial ruin and has just six remaining customers. Representatives of HavenCo dispute Lackey's description of the company's status.

Lackey attributed HavenCo's troubles to difficulties with the "ruling family" of the Principality of Sealand, which claims to be a sovereign nation even though the platform lies within British territorial waters. Lackey told an audience at the DefCon hacker convention that Sealand was nervous about hosting controversial clients, and caused network outages by "tinkering" with the company's network connections.

An unnamed representative of HavenCo painted a different story in an e-mail response to an inquiry from C/Net's Declan McCullagh. "We have a moderate-sized installation which is growing monthly, very many more than the alleged six customers and their servers in operation, and in the last eight months or so have been able completely to re-engineer our network and its international connectivity arrangements," the representative said Monday.

Lackey is still listed as the administrative and technical contacts for HavenCo in domain records. If HavenCo is really so secure, why does a disgruntled former employee who says he is owed $220,000 still have management control over their primary business domains? One wonders if Lackey is still the technical contact on customer domains as well. Security consultants consistently cite failure to limit ex-employees' access to key business data as a failing of many corporations.