Internet archaeology

Rapid7 has decided to sunset AttackerKB.

I don't specifically have an issue with this: while there was potential for community involvement, most of the content came from Rapid7 labs. The decision to move publishing labs data to the Rapid7 blog is well within their rights.

What I do have issues with:

• The timing
• Erasing history

Let's dive into those...

The timing

Rapid7 have provided a month warning that AttackerKB is going away. Not just the website, but the API. Anyone who was using that API has 30 days to find and implement an alternative solution. The claim is usage was very low, only a handful of active users. If that's the case, the cost to maintain it in the status quo is essentially zero.

The particularly irksome piece to this is that the usual process is to announce end-of-sale, and then end-of-life at least 12 months after that. A year rather than a month. Give people time to do something.

Erasing history

Even worse is the removal of all the historical content. The announced plan is to migrate content from attackerkb.com to the Rapid7 blog, with redirects on the original URL.

I don't like this plan.

Even if they maintain links for a while, at some point someone is going to run a project to rebuild the site, and a bunch of link pruning will take place.

The best way to approach this would be to turn the existing site into a static collection. Add a link to the relevant page on rapid7.com to a header or footer or something. But leave the original content there. Preserve the history.

So much content is being lost, leaving behind a mess of link rot. Companies can chose to stop doing this. I wish they would.