ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization that oversees internet domain names, has been hacked. In late November 2014 they were targeted with a spear phishing attack, and then this month they discovered that the compromised credentials were used to access other ICANN systems besides email. This included the Centralized Zone Data System. [Read more…]
Ever since I originally noticed that Apple was registering nonsense domain names, I have been intrigued about why they would be registering and then not renewing nonsense domain names. And it’s not just one or two domain names, or a dozen of them.
This time, Afilias Special Projects has registered 1862 new domain names in the past 24 hours, which is a significant amount of domain names. Registration fees alone for 1800 .info domain names would be at least $15,000. These new domain names, are all .info domain names, and are pointed to the Apple.com name servers, just like the other nonsense domain names I’ve been following. [Read more…]
Apple has deleted over 500 domain names this week, and decided not to renew these domain names. Most of these domain names were registered by Apple exactly one year ago, and after coming up for renewal they have not renewed them. [Read more…]
7Search, a leading Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising and Affiliate Network, along with a few other search and domain parking companies, have been accused of traffic stealing in eye-opening research paper titled Understanding the Dark Side of Domain Parking.
The paper, presented at the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium, was researched and written by Sumayah Alrwais, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Kan Yuan, Indiana University Bloomington; Eihal Alowaisheq, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Zhou Li, Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories; XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington. [Read more…]
Google has activated their first New gTLD domain name, which is nic.google. Nic.Google currently redirects to the Google Registry.
It appears that Facebook acquired Messenger.com recently. Checking the name servers and the whois data for Messenger.com, there was a recent change to the name servers: from lovellsnames.org to facebook.com, and the registrant is now Facebook. [Read more…]
