Popular indie storefront itch.io went offline between 6.00 pm AEDT Tuesday to 12.00 am AEDT Wednesday morning, and blames collectibles company Funko and “some trash ‘AI powered’ Brand Protection Software” over the outage.
The site fell victim to what it called “some bogus Phishing report” to its registrar, who responded by temporarily disabling the domain.
“I kid you not, [itch.io] has been taken down by [Funko] because they use some trash ‘AI Powered’ Brand Protection Software called [Brand Protection] that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, [iwantmyname], who ignored our response and just disabled the domain,” reads a full post from itch.io as posted on Twitter.
Funko later responded to the takedown request, saying, “recently, one of our brand protection partners identified a page on http://itch.io imitating the Funko Fusion development website. A takedown request was issued to address this specific page. Funko did not request a takedown of the [itch.io] platform, and we’re happy the site was back up by this morning.”
Leaf Corcoran, the founder of itch.io, corroborated Funko’s statement, telling Hacker News that, “from what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game.”
Corcoran continued on to say that, “the BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all ‘unauthorized’ use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was ‘fraud and phishing’ going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they’re the malicious actor in all of this.”
Corcoran also confirmed that he “immediately” responded to the removal request, and that five days passed with no response between his action and the takedown of itch.io.
“BrandShield serves as a trusted partner to many global brands,” said CEO Yoav Keren in a statement. “Our AI-driven platform detects potential threats and provides analysis; then our team of Cybersecurity Threat hunters and IP lawyers decide on what actions should be taken.
“In this case, an abuse was identified from the itch.io subdomain,” Keren continued. “BrandShield remains committed to supporting our clients by identifying potential digital threats and infringements and we encourage platforms to implement stronger self-regulation systems that prevent such issues from occurring.”
Very luckily, the takedown didn’t occur over itch.io’s big Autumn Sale, nor the day in which all sales went directly to creators. Nevertheless, it’s not ideal that an indie storefront can be taken out so decidedly and swiftly.
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