Typosquatters set up booby-trapped High Street names Fraudsters have established thousands of typosquatting sites designed to hoodwink customers of popular shopping sites into handing over personal information to fraudulent dopplegangers. Utilising slightly misspelled domain names, prospective marks are taken to mirror sites designed to either harvest personal data or subject …
Quite - looking at the full domain list, I am genuinely astounded that nobody at Debenhams IT thought it might be a good idea to register at least the .co.uk and .com versions of "debbenhams" and "debenhems".
I am also delighted to see "arrgos.co.uk" on that list - an appropriate name for a pirate version of a high-street store if I ever saw one!
I seem to have picked up another fanboi. Cool :-)
Fanboi-AC, has it occurred to you that perhaps, maybe, some people have actually been in the industry longer than you have probably been alive? And that along the way, we've actually learned a thingie or six?
Some of us old farts post here, and try to help the up and coming techies look outside the box. Sarah Bee called it "tilting at windmills". She was probably right.
I post about what we did thirty+ years ago, because from my perspective, today we are repeating the mistakes we made thirty-odd years ago and needlessly constraining progress. "The more you forget history" and all that ...
I'm confused.... how does "Some of us old farts post here, and try to help the up and coming techies look outside the box." marry up with "This is news? Gawdess ... I must be in a decades-old time warp ..." you comment is completly non constructive.
In this particular case there are some important changes, firstly cyber squatters are duplicating genuine sites, rather than just making up their own "enter your username and password", some of these are actually good quality, including proper field validation, we have even found one which proxies the request to the genuine site while capturing all the details, in addition the lurking quietly and then popping up at the last moment (after previously redirecting the request is new), it used to be that sites would just typosquat, perhaps serving up a porn site and then "offering" the site for sale to the genuine site owner (I believe Virgin gets this a lot, for obvious reasons).
So yes, similar things have been seen before, and no doubt you have seen these things, I was involved in a typosquating scam nearly 20 years ago which then prompted the purchase of nearly 50 domain names for each one we actually used (*.com, *org, *.ltd, *.co.uk for each [mis]spelling variation), and of course there's some you'll miss and some which could well be genuinely used by a valid company, one mans typo is another mans company, have you every guessed a domain name but got a completely different but genuine company?
So, either add to the conversation with a useful first-hand anecdote, comment on how things have changed, question why specific things haven't changed, but don't just say "when I were a lad there were 150 of us living in a cardboard box in the the middle of the road" - I'm not sure how your comments "try to help the up and coming techies look outside the box" - when you've added nothing to the conversation.
Why do people have such a problem reading for actual content? My first post in this thread was addressing the original article. My second post was addressing the AC's reply to mine.
As for the rest of yours, we were spoofing servers with "man in the middle" stuff before Flag Day, and naming servers with obvious typoes for similar purposes. As an example, I had three separate systems, called "stanford!sail!sailvax" and "stanford!sail!sailvaz" and stanford!sail!sailvas"[1] located at Stanford's SAIL, at the Telco under Bryant Street in Palo Alto, and at a DEC office on the Cupertino-Sunnyvale border. Was part of one of my Masters dissertations. In 1978. (I was a DEC intern & had access to all kinds of kit ... Was a very strange time in the world of computers & networking).
Back then it was a game ... We had no idea how big this thing would get. But we did come up with workarounds, which STILL exist, if you care make an effort to get an education, instead of insisting on having it fed to you on a plate.
If you don't comprehend the basics, you're not equipped. The more we forget ...
[1] Exact names changed to protect the guilty ;-)
Any people wonder why I used google to sift through the junk.
If I don't know how to spell the brand name I want to shop for, or indeed whether the shop is .com or .co.uk I simply type a g followed by a space and then my best guess at how to spell it into the address bar and blam, google interprets my abysmal spelling and gives me the correct place to go.
I remember back in the day, johnlewis.co.uk was a local painter but it seems as though he's sold his domain name. I think PCWorld.com and PCWorld.co.uk is my best example of why my method is my preferred way of finding stores.
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