PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Linking can be helpful – but not always… while disinformation can spread like a virus

Updated Beware: the people behind PuTTY, the renowned FOSS SSH client for Windows, are not the same people as those behind the PUTTY.ORG website.

An unfolding controversy over the contents of a website that contained links to several different pieces of SSH-related software has escalated. At the time of writing, the owners of the website have replaced this content with anti-vaccination propaganda.

PuTTY is a well-known SSH client by Simon Tatham, "a software engineer and free-software author in Cambridge, UK" as he describes himself. PuTTY has been around for a long time. As far as we can tell, The Register first mentioned it in 2008, when it was already about a decade old. The oldest release described in the change history on its homepage is version "0.45 (released 1999-01-22)."

The issue began because the PuTTY homepage is https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. The Register's own Verity Stob described it as a "charming, ancient website" back in 2013.

The PuTTY software, and Tatham's homepage, are hosted on Chiark, which is a famous web server in its own right. Let's put it this way: in 2022 we wrote a news story about the process of upgrading Chiark to Debian 11. Chiark has been running the same installation of Debian since 1993, when there were a total of 693 websites. Sure, its hardware has been upgraded quite a few times, but this is a 32-year-old OS installation. The copy of Debian on "Chiark" has a strong claim to be the oldest running web server.

The thing is that these days, many people tend to expect that well-known software would have a short, simple URL. Such as, in this case, PUTTY.ORG. For instance, Lithuanian hosting company Hostinger links to PUTTY.ORG when discussing SSH, it's mentioned in answers on StackExchange, and PUTTY.ORG is the first hit on Bing, only then followed by the author's own site.

However, PUTTY.ORG is nothing to do with PuTTY or Simon Tatham. In fact, it's owned and run by Bitvise, the vendor of proprietary SSH software for Windows, including a paid server and a free client.

This is not a case of typo squatting. Bitvise owns PUTTY.ORG and has since 2008, when it looked like this – a simple, mostly text page, with pointers to the FOSS PuTTY client, and only after that, to Bitvise's own freeware SSH client and server. Before Bitvise, PUTTY.ORG belonged to an American web consultancy of the same name.

Using a dot-org domain like this isn't actively misleading. The company did link to the real PuTTY site, and it did so before its own products. The number of sites linking to PUTTY.ORG show that this causes genuine confusion, but it is cheap advertising.

There was nothing deceptive there. Then blogger PupRed contacted them to ask about it. It seems the company objected to this. Initially, it added a line below its FAQ, which read: "On July 13, 2025, Bitvise was contacted by a political interrogator posing as a journalist." It went on to reproduce the exchange, which we won't link to here as it could potentially compromise the individual's safety.

We contacted Bitvise, and the company's co-founder, denis bider (who styles his name without capital letters) told us:

The story of this domain is pretty simple. It was originally registered in 1999 by unrelated third parties, for purposes unrelated to software. A few years later, I was miffed how difficult it is to find and verify the official PuTTY download page, so I purchased this domain from its original owners, and used it to point people to the official PuTTY page. Since I paid money for this, I also used it to mention my own software.

Now communists hate me for this, because people should not do things like that. So now I updated the page to provide a more important, critical public service.

The update to which he refers is live at the time of writing. Now PUTTY.ORG no longer links to Bitvise's own software; instead, it embeds a video by a COVID-denialist and anti-vaccination activist, retired pharmacologist Michael Yeadon.

Youtube Video

To be fair, bider's own homepage refers to his own musings as "wacky, conspiracy-theorist posts," such as this one from March claiming "Viruses are made up." (By way of context, The Reg FOSS desk has a degree in biology and has studied viral reproduction. He can attest that viruses are entirely real, and vaccines help prevent humans and animals from becoming ill due to viral infections. Mr bider is wrong, and so is Dr Yeadon.)

We also asked Simon Tatham, who said:

Despite the FAQ on putty.org stating that the site isn't associated with the PuTTY developers, there is still considerable confusion, and I'd like to have it more widely known that putty.org isn't the right place to go.

We hope this article helps clarify the issue. He continued:

Whatever the legalities of Bitvise's use of putty.org (and I've heard opinions in both directions), running a site like that seems like shockingly unprofessional behaviour, and I'm surprised it doesn't have more of an impact on Bitvise's general reputation. I wouldn't buy any product from a company who I knew behaved like that!

®

Bootnotes

In an era when people don't check who owns what before they link to it, we felt some explanation was necessary.

PuTTY capitalizes TTY because TTY is the Unix abbreviation for a terminal, derived from Teletype. In the 1960s, when the original Unix was written, a physical teletype was the main kind of hardware used to interact with computers. Nowadays tty is a Linux command, but it's also found in other file names, such as getty.

Historically, putty was the substance glaziers used to secure glass in window frames.

Chiark is a place in the novel The Player of Games by the late great Iain Banks.

In case anyone from Hostinger should read this article and amend their SSH page, this is how it looked at the time of writing.

At the start of 2025, PUTTY.ORG looked like this.

When we started writing this article, there was an additional line accusing PupRed of deception.

At publication time, the page was filled with anti-science rhetoric. The Register has taken the decision not to link to the current live page.

Updated to add:

PuTTY now has its own official domain and webpages.

Developer Simon Tatham announced on Mastodon that it now has its own standalone web page on its own domain: https://putty.software/ (Note that there is no “www” on the front.)

The new landing page also has its own FAQ. Tatham noted on the platform, with what we feel is great restraint:

The domain putty.software is run by the actual PuTTY development team. We’re not trying to advertise unrelated proprietary software at you, or change our content unexpectedly.

It also explains why it is a separate page and doesn’t just redirect to the main PuttY page:

We plan to move the main site here in future. But we want to give people some warning first, and give them some time to update links. We don’t want anyone thinking PuTTY has been hacked, or taken over, or stolen.