8 ms·
Most parked domains now serving malicious content
- excalibur 11mo agoThe bit about the gmai.com mailserver is disturbing. One would imagine there are many other typo squatters with a similar setup.
- imglorp 11mo agoI just checked. At least it's not answering on 25 to receive all that free typo mail. Same for gmali.com. But they could spoof the gmail login page. Not finding out. PORT STATE SERVICE 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https 8080/tcp open http-proxy
- MrDOS 11mo agoYou're looking in the wrong place. They don't need to be listening for mail on the machine behind the A/AAAA records for the domain, because they have an MX record indicating that mail should be delivered elsewhere: $ dig MX gmai.com +short 1 mail.h-email.net. Port 25 is very rare these days, as it implies the possibility of unencrypted traffic; legitimate SMTP traffic uses port 587. That said, I checked a couple of the hosts that that name resolves to, and they all listen for both SMTP and secure SMTP traffic: $ nmap -p 25,587 mail.h-email.net Starting Nmap 7.95 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2025-12-18 16:31 UTC Nmap scan report for mail.h-email.net (165.227.159.144) Host is up (0.093s latency). Other addresses for mail.h-email.net (not scanned): 91.107.214.206 165.227.156.49 167.235.143.33 5.75.171.74 5.161.194.135 178.62.199.248 5.161.98.212 162.55.164.116 49.13.4.90 rDNS record for 165.227.159.144: mail2.h-email.net PORT STATE SERVICE 25/tcp open smtp 587/tcp open submission
- johndoeee 11mo agomail.h-email.net is a Spamhaus spamtrap. As far as I've been able to research, these typesquatting domain traps started at the same time as Spamhaus CSS blacklist which was actually a company called Deteque. If the MX has a large number of Hetzner IPs as mailservers, then it's probably Spamhaus.
- MrDOS 11mo agoAh, neat – that certainly makes me feel a bit better, then.
- phsau 11mo agoPort 25 is only uncommon for client submission, but prevalent for MTA>MTA traffic.
- Bender 11mo agoI park mine by having no IP address, MX record is "0 ." meaning it does not receive email, the SPF record is "v=spf1 -all" and DMARC is a strict reject, CAA is 0 issue ";", BIMI is "v=BIMI1; l=; a=;". I do the same for wildcard DNS. There's probably more I should add.
- ericpauley 11mo agoIndeed, this is a common practice in the broader data. It seems the linked article is filtering to resolvable+hosted domains, a subset of overall domain parking.
- Bender 11mo agoYup. That's why I am suggesting to stop that practice and just remove the IP rather than trusting the landing page someone else maintains. Or if one would like to give bots something to do point it to a multicast address or perhaps MoD/US Military address.
- bks 11mo agoThe m3aawg has a parked domain guide - https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/m3aawg_parked_domains_bcp-2022-06.pdf https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/m3aawg_parked_dom...
- Bender 11mo agoI appreciate that but I will always follow the Bender Domain Parking Standard [1]. [1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/domain_parking_standard.txt https://mirror.newsdump.org/domain_parking_standard.txt
- ericpauley 11mo agoWe did a large-scale study of this phenomenon recently: https://www.cs.bu.edu/faculty/crovella/paper-archive/wung-ifip-networking25-dns.pdf https://www.cs.bu.edu/faculty/crovella/paper-archive/wung-if... Across a broad sample of typo domains of major sites, most registered domains aren’t actually reachable, implying they are registered for defensive, legitimate, or unrelated purposes. Interestingly, the typo space on major sites is actually very sparsely registered (2% at edit distance 1), meaning that typosquatting may actually be underexploited.
- belorn 11mo agoA possible explanation why typos for major sites are sparsely registered could be that the domain industry has put a lot of focus the last decade on addressing malicious registrations, and many registrars that focus on the market segment of large companies sell products that monitor for malicious registrations with legal response in case one pops up. It is also seems that bulk registrars has gotten better filters to reduce malicious registrations, which is a service some security companies offer to registrars. In theory it should be quite more difficult today for a malicious actor to go to a major registrar and buy an obvious trademark infringing domain for a major site. Domain/trademark monitoring also directly compete with defensive registrations. Often it is a question if you want to pay the lawyers/monitoring service, a large number of registration/renewal fees, or both.
- AStrangeMorrow 11mo agoMy guess is also that not all typos are equal. Should have a stricter edit version for 1-keystroke-away filtered edits (that is delete, swap or add 1 key away / replace one key away) instead of pure Levenshtein. Like Fqcebook is a more likely typo than Fjcebook but they are both edit-1
- teddyh 11mo agoSomeone should make a qwertyshtein() function.
- zahlman 11mo ago
- moralestapia 11mo agoThis just happened to me a month ago, I was waiting for a unused domain to expire. The domain was hosted on Epik (which I think is a trashy company but w/e). About a month before expiration it somehow got renewed for 10 years, which is weird because it was not available ... and is now hosting a "get-rich-quick" scam that pretends to be a genuine Petro Canada campaign.
- homebrewer 11mo ago> About a month before expiration it somehow got renewed for 10 years, which is weird because it was not available I've seen some domain registrars auctioning off domains during the last 2-4 weeks before they expire. If nobody buys it, then it actually expires and is then released.
- HWR_14 11mo agoWhich registrars? I would want to avoid those.
- reactordev 11mo agoAt the end of the day, no matter your domain, ICANN can just take it for their VC bros. Happened to a friend of mine that owned a pretty novel domain name that a certain social media company wanted. He refused to sell. ICANN and his registrar just transferred it out from under him. Gone. See ya.
- Tade0 11mo agoWow. In light of this it's amazing that Mr. Nissan (RIP) and later his heirs managed to not only retain control of nissan.com, but regain it after it was stolen years after his passing.
- reactordev 11mo agoMoney talks
- dvh 11mo agoYesterday I received spam with link on https://storage.googleapis.com/ https://storage.googleapis.com/ that redirected to some parked domain.
- rickcarlino 11mo agoHopefully “direct navigation” does not become a boogeyman like “side loading” has.
- wlesieutre 11mo agoEspecially when the alternative is "type the company name into google" where the top 3 results are ads and they've previously been seen to stick malware distribution sites above the legitimate company pages This was happening for months with blender in 2022/2023, previously collected links about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34917701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34917701
- xp84 11mo agoTop 3 are ads? Usually it’s more like 1. D-tier AI Slop Overview 2. Shopping ads 3. A bunch of AdWords ads 4. A bunch more Google-specific content (maps etc) 5. 1-3 organic results (Or sometimes 0 unless you click a “More results” link)
- belorn 11mo agoTheir definition of parked domain is a bit odd, with "expired" domain names and typosquatting” domains. I work at a registrar and the absolutely vast majority of parked domains for us are domains owned by customers that register alternative versions, campaign, products and misspellings of their primary domain. Parked in that sense mean an almost empty zone with occasionally a default landing page, sometimes as a paid DNS service at the registrar, and sometimes as a free service (There are still registration and renewal fees). Putting a redirect onto such domain would be a major bad faith act by the registrar and a reason to avoid that registrar at all costs. The customer is the owner of that name, has their name attached as the registrant, and generally hold some legal risk while doing so. It also goes directly against the primary reason why the customers bought the domains in the first place. The ones that hold advertisement two specific cases. One is "expired" domains which are not actually expired but where the registrar holds on to it in the hope that the old or new customer will buy it for an extra cost. The other is names which a customer or the registrar itself bought as an investment in hope to auction out. That kind of behavior was historically frowned at but is fairly common practice for a smaller number of domains. Usually you don't put redirects on those since you want to expose the fact that the domain is for sale. So I am very confused where they got their 90% number from, but then I would not call typosquatting as parked domains if its registered by a malicious actor and used for a scam on their own servers (or hacked servers as it may be).
- xp84 11mo agoYeah, I think there’s just multiple definitions of the word “parked” in play. To a registrar it may just mean idle, but there is an industry out there of what I’d call “monetized parking” where you can point domains to this kind of garbage and collect the ad money. It’s unclear what the definition used in this study is.
- RankingMember 11mo agoWe've unfortunately come a long (bad) way from the innocuous "backpack girl" parking pages. For a refresher: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/033/037/girl.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/033/037/gir...
- zahlman 11mo ago> For a refresher I've never seen that image before. :/
- RankingMember 11mo agoMore background: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/parked-domain-girl https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/parked-domain-girl
- bookofjoe 11mo agoI remember her!
- armenarmen 11mo agoI owned facebook.ky, as a goof, for about 2 weeks 10+ years ago before Facebook claimed it from me. Wild to me that huge banks don’t have a team whose responsibility it is to watch for and seize scam domains
- thaack 11mo agoFacebook[1], Google, etc all use (or used to use) MarkMonitor that offers domain squatting monitoring as a service[2] that utilizes the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy to remove offending domains violating their trademark. These services are quite expensive from my understanding. [1] It appears Facebook now utilizes their own internal registry. [2] https://www.markmonitor.com/domain-dispute-recovery-solutions/ https://www.markmonitor.com/domain-dispute-recovery-solution...
- hnburnsy 11mo ago>“In large scale experiments, we found that over 90% of the time, visitors to a parked domain would be directed to illegal content, scams, scareware and anti-virus software subscriptions, or malware, as the ‘click’ was sold from the parking company to advertisers, who often resold that traffic to yet another party,” Infoblox researchers wrote in a paper published today. Hey, same thing happens with my Google search results, what a coincidence!
- DoctorOW 11mo agoYeah maybe it's not over 90% of the time. But I wonder if a study has been done to what the percentage is just for search ads.
- dredmorbius 11mo agoA similar trend I've noticed in the US within recent years has been that misdialing toll-free numbers(or even correctly dialing an apparently expired number), originally "area code" 800, since expanded to include 888, 877, 866, 855, and 844, will lead to a scam or advertising connection. This is one of numerous trustworthiness attacks on general public-switched telephone network (PSTN) use which I suspect will lead to an increased abandonment of that system. If we can neither trust either incoming or outgoing calls to connect to a trustworthy counterparty, people will tend to prefer systems which do so. (This is on top of privacy and security issues with PSTN, including data exfiltration by operators, and potential for wiretapping and intercepting voice, texts, and data.)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- cozyman 11mo ago[dead]
- bradley13 11mo agoI've seen this on some of the domains speculatively registered by companies hoping to sell them for a fortune. Pick a dictionary word, or just a short (3 or 4 letter) Domain Name. If it's not actually in use, somebody had registered it and would love to sell it for some stupid amount. In the mean time, I guess they pay the fees by renting to scammers... I really wish the domain registrar's would prohibit speculation, but there's money to be made, so...
- teeray 11mo agoCan we have a land value tax for domains?
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoWe have one; that's the registration fee.
- xp84 11mo agoIt feels like the price should vary by how many a legal entity has. It would be nice for one to be super cheap, 5 to be perfectly acceptable for a business to afford, and 100 to be unfathomably expensive. And maybe trademarks would get you a big break (on domains that contain your trademark) since you’re not hogging anything anyone else could legally use. Of course, this is fantasy though because it’s not worth forcing people to tie their identity documents to registrations.