According to The Washington Post, Network Solutions/Verisign -- the registrar which controls the lucrative .com top level domain -- leaked the private e-mail addresses of tens of thousands of customers via an e-mail broadcast. The leaked addresses belonged to individual users and network administrators who had registered ".org" addresses with the company.

While many of the e-mail addresses on the leaked list are also available from the company's "WHOIS" servers, they are difficult to gather because they must be extracted from the database one at a time. Network Solutions prohibits, and tries to prevent, wholesale harvesting of addresses from the database. The broadcast, which sent a list of more than 85,000 addresses all at once, circumvented those protections. Ironically, Verisign, Network Solutions' parent company, uses "The Value of Trust" as its corporate credo, and issues encryption keys and certificates to "secure" Web sites.