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It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one'
by ariehkovler 7mo ago
It's worse than that. There's a SECOND imitator that I actually stumbled on today while looking something up about nanoclaw - nanoclawS [dot] io - and that one's harvesting email addresses.
The obvious risk here is a bait and switch, where one of these sites switches their link to the Github repo to point to a malicious imitator repo instead.
One approach would be to go after the sites themselves, not their Google ranking. See if their hosts are willing to take them down. Is there anything you can assert copyright over to hang a DCMA request on? That's hard for an Open Source project, I guess. And the fake sites aren't (yet) doing any actual scamming.
Good luck, though!
- yorwba 7mo agoThe article says "Filed takedown notices with Google, Cloudflare, and the domain registrar spaceship.com"
- ariehkovler 7mo agoYeah but you do need to hang the takedown on some technical reason like copyright or scamming. The issue here is there's no obvious victim. Makes a takedown harder.
- mx7zysuj4xew 7mo agoSince the clone site isn't doing anything obviously malicious like spreading malware or blatantly illegal content none of those parties will take any action whatsoever, nor should they.
- jacquesm 7mo agoIt isn't doing that now, but you can't be sure about what they're going to be up to a little ways down the line, the fact that they are clearly trying to misdirect the traffic is proof positive they're up to no good. Just do a bit of risk assessment if something like this were to be shipped to people that have come to blindly trust the source and you'll see why letting this slip is a very bad idea.
- pocksuppet 7mo agoMost registrars and hosts consider phishing already malicious, even if there's no obvious malware download or anything.
- luckylion 7mo ago"Phishing" has a _very_ different meaning from "offer the option to sign up for a newsletter", let's not conflate the two.
- andai 7mo agoWell, pretending to be an unrelated 3rd party for the purposes of harvesting people's personal information, which can then be used to send them emails, which they will think are from that unrelated 3rd party...
- pocksuppet 7mo agoThe meaning registrars and hosts use is "looks like someone else's website"
- luckylion 7mo agoCould be, but this doesn't. It has the same name and is _about_ the same thing, but it doesn't look like the other site. Just because you have pocksuppet.org and I hack pocksuppet.net doesn't mean that one of us is phishing.
- james_marks 7mo ago*yet Build the audience first, attack comes later