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Researchers’ Typosquatting Stole 20 GB of E-Mail From Fortune 500
- ChrisArchitect 15y agowish this wouldn't conclude sounding like a ploy to convince everyone to buy up misspelled domains.
- djb_hackernews 15y agoDon't worry, that already happened a long time ago.
- aw3c2 15y agoI only glanced over that article but 20 Gigabytes? 120000 e-mails? In 6 months? Does that include all the spam?
- ableal 15y agoIt takes a while for the spammers to get up to speed on new domains. Six months should see relatively little spam. I'd bet on reply-all and auto-complete as means of perpetuating small mistakes in addresses. There's no cleanup mechanism for it.
- gravitronic 15y agoSlightly OT but interesting. This was true a year ago, unsure if it is still in effect today. In Gmail, if I send an email to Alice and Bob, but modify Alice's name to "Anne" (or anything else) in the email's "To:" field, and Bob replies all, Gmail saves the change to Alice's contact information in Bob's user list. Alice will now show up as Anne in his google talk and in his contact list.
- swaits 15y agoPretty sure that's not "stealing".
- jdp23 15y agoyeah really, bizarre word choice
- unfletch 15y agoIt's not bizarre, it's sensationalistic. If you hadn't heard the phrase "link bait", you've now been introduced.
- adgar 15y agoAgreed. "intercepted" seems the most appropriate.
- jemka 15y ago"intercepted" isn't any better.
- adgar 15y agoYes it is. You can intercept something for good or for ill, there's no connotation there, but it does imply some degree of intent to capture something. These researchers fully intended and expected to capture some e-mails. They didn't want to steal them, they weren't doing anything wrong, they just wanted to see how many e-mails they'd get and write a paper. I'd say intercepting the e-mails is at least a better description than theft.
- seabee 15y agoSometimes I get mail intended for the house at 65 rather than 85. I'm pretty sure I didn't "intercept" it.
- a1k0n 15y agoYes, but you didn't create the street number 65 with the intention of catching mail from 85 either.
- mathgladiator 15y agoSo, if you are in a fortune 500 IT department, you should probably set up a honey pot to find people doing this now.
- pheaduch 15y agoI have the same issue with one of my domains and I get all types of emails including highly confidential ones including banking emails.
- slig 15y agoOnce a friend snapped hotNail.com.<Our country code> . The amount of email he got was amazing and that was 8 years ago.
- anons2011 15y agohotmail.cm would be a very good one, seems like someone has turned it into a ad/survey site along time ago though.
- aristus 15y ago:D It's much worse than you imagine. The entire TLD .cm (Cameroon) was transformed into a typosquat years ago. http://texturbation.com/blog/?p=95 http://texturbation.com/blog/?p=95
- AretNCarlsen 15y agoTo beat the old drum: Email isn't intended to be secure anyway. Relying on email addresses to maintain privacy and authenticity is like relying on Caller ID to verify callers' identities. (See spoofcard.com.) Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. Or, encrypt.
- dmix 15y agoYou can encrypt your way out of typos and domain-squatting?
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoSquatters can't use your email if they can't read it.
- eru 15y agoThey could only do traffic analysis.
- darksaga 15y agoYeah, it's still shocking to me how many fortune 500 companies still don't understand how vulnerable they are to simple hacks like this. I would've thought it would be SOP (standard operating procedure) to encrypt their email years ago. I guess a normal level of paranoia hasn't quite reached those companies yet huh?
- pinko 15y agoNo, email encryption is a godawful mess and impossible for normal humans to use. And you can't control who sends you email.
- cfinke 15y agoShameless (and I mean shameless) plug for my latest project that collects statistics on what domains people mistype: http://typed.it/ http://typed.it/ (Log in with demo@typed.it/demo for full access.)
- SergeyHack 15y agoIt would be better to show the timezone, whether it's UTC or what. For example here: http://typed.it/reports/traffic/stackoverflow.com/hour http://typed.it/reports/traffic/stackoverflow.com/hour
- there 15y agoi thought this was going to be related to the memory errors causing incorrect dns lookups: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/10/bh-2011-bit-squatting-dns-hijacking-without-exploitation/ http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/10/bh-2011-bit-squat...
- unfletch 15y agoI get a ton of misdirected email, but for different reasons. The first is that I have a common nickname @gmail.com. There are many other users with some variation on that nickname @gmail.com, and people are careless about typos, including suffixes, etc. It's a similar cause to the article, but the username instead of the domain. The second case is a more interesting one: I bought an expired domain. Now I get all kinds of email sent to what used to be legitimate email addresses of the old domain owners. For more than one of them it was clearly their primary email address. I was getting emails related to bank accounts, Netflix, Facebook, etc. I thought about trying to get in touch with those users, but ultimately decided to bounce their email. It was something I hadn't considered when buying an expired domain, or about my own email addresses, but it's a real problem. Here's hoping my email provider never lets their domain expire.
- keidian 15y agoI get a ton of email to my own gmail, which is just my first initial & last name. I didn't realize there were as many people out there sharing them until I got that email. One that bought a car about 6 months ago, one a cell phone, etc. Since I have no way of contacting these people and it's not a domain where I can block out certain addresses, I will usually get at least one email a week where I go uh, what is this? For a while I kept getting building floorplans in progress from one company as it seemed they all used a common address book with the incorrect email added.