4 ms·

Scammers are scammers? What's next? Hosting DNS for botnets?

• Dylan16807 11y ago
  Wouldn't that make them easier to track? Refusal to sell a domain to a scammer can help the world. Refusing to resolve a domain is kind of pointless, and I want a DNS server to tell me the truth.
  • yoo1I 11y ago
    See the problem is getting at the actual perpetrators. You are surely correct, the further down the line they can be stopped the better. But due to they way these scammers operate it becomes difficult to impossible to reach them. One action that increases the cost of criminal organizations is then to deny them usage of resources of legitimate companies. All these usually have an AUP which prohibits certain activities. And I am with you, a DNS resolver should tell the truth. What I am asking CloudFlare to do, is to not accept certain customers in the first place, so that they don't get to use the CloudFlare authorative DNS servers. Obviously this works best if hosting providers do the same thing.
  • lstamour 11y ago
    Actually I hear DNS is often used with cloud APIs as a way to have botnets and trojans contact the mothership for things like instructions or wiring payment to decrypt drives, etc. It used to be they were at the same domain names, but folks got wise and started banning domains, so now they use domain name "trials" and random domain names to resolve to changing IP addresses at scheduled intervals. Or at least that's how I remember hearing it described. So DNS is as critical to botnets/bad guys as anything else is online. Also, since registries are global, all it takes is one country refusing to follow the rest of the world in trying to block spammers from registering domains, and DNS resolution becomes part of the solution. Of course they could go elsewhere but at least CloudFlare wouldn't be part of the problem.