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Author: Derek

Avast highlights the failing in consumer protection

Avast highlights the failing in consumer protection

Sometimes we can learn a lot from what experts in their field of operation publish. Ironically we saw this yesterday again when Avast, a large anti-virus vendor, quoted an article by John Wasik on Forbes: All online scams have one thing in common: They want to tap your greed to get at personal information they can steal. These “phishing” ruses are happening 24/7. A typical banking scam will ask for information so the scammer can access anything from your credit…

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The GDPR and blanket privacy: Hold on – who watches the guardians ICANN?

The GDPR and blanket privacy: Hold on – who watches the guardians ICANN?

ICANN had two complaints they closed, escalated back to them last week. One was a Registrar Standards complaint, one was regarding a rogue reseller proxy at the registrar which is the subject of the first complaint. Why? What happens where we have a registrar that serially accepts and has been accepting weak unverified registration details, for at least the past four years into the registries, in violation of the ICANN RAA and this leads to mass abuse? What happens if…

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Three vehicle scams, a warning in a GDPR WHOIS future

Three vehicle scams, a warning in a GDPR WHOIS future

The worlds leading and biggest registrar, GoDaddy, has adopted the attitude that the registrant name, phone number and email address is private information, much in line with the proposed ICANN WHOIS changes to meet the requirements of the upcoming GDPR the end of this month (May, 2018). These changes by Godaddy has left various commercial and governmental players dissatisfied, leading to a complaint to ICANN via Mr Brian Winterfeldt (Winterfeldt IP Group, PLLLC): https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/winterfeldt-to-chalaby-et-al-10mar18-en.pdf ICANN is still stalling on this…

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The Roman Bathhouse Babies

The Roman Bathhouse Babies

What rights do you have as an ordinary internet consumer? To best answer this, let’s first look at a recent discovery more than a 100 baby skeletons in a Roman bathhouse sewer: The discovery of a mass baby grave under Roman bathhouse in Ashkelon, Israel Along the shores of Israel’s Mediterranean coast, in the ancient seaport of Ashkelon, archaeologist Ross Voss made a gruesome find. While exploring one of the city’s sewers, he discovered a large number of small bones….

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Looking back at 2017

Looking back at 2017

2017 was a disastrous year for the consumer in the cyber fraud arena and we saw a lot happening. It’s all to easy looking at numbers such as our 2017 statistics, not realizing what they represent. This period was a virtual war where consumers lost their livelihoods after being defrauded, the numbers represent futures lost, the undermining of one of the marvels of the 21st century, the internet. Behind each increase in count, we find misery multiplied. These are directly…

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The Faker Maker

The Faker Maker

The role of the Faker Maker in 419 frauds is not generally known. Yet he is key to the long-term success of a scam. This term, although the origins of it have been lost, is used to describe somebody knowingly facilitating 419 frauds from a technical perspective for personal gain in exchange for the risk of doing so. He is a technical specialist services provider to parties involved in 419 fraud and knowingly and willingly facilitating. It’s not uncommon to…

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We don’t accept these email domain endings

We don’t accept these email domain endings

On the 1st of November 2017, Artists Against 419 blocked emails email addresses using the following top level domains to our mail services: .accountant .bid .cricket .date .download .faith .loan .men .party .racing .review .science .stream .trade .webcam .win This step was most regrettable, but we reserve the right to stop any serial abuse of our email services and resources. Suddenly today we saw a massive spam inflow from at least two of these TLDs. The patterns were all too…

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An open letter to Godaddy: Whois Service

An open letter to Godaddy: Whois Service

Quick links: Update 2017-09-27 Update 2017-11-04 Update 2017-11-23 Update 2017-11-24 Dear Godaddy Artists Against 419 has been champions for the consumer since 2003. In our efforts at fighting advance fee fraud, we use various data sources to enable threat identification and mitigation. Let us be extremely clear on this issue, Artists Against 419 has no commercial ambitions. All our efforts are done with trusted volunteer assistance and self funded. Here is the problem we are addressing: The consumer has no…

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Security broken. WHOIS it?

Security broken. WHOIS it?

As a consumer of WHOIS data in our attempt at fighting cyber fraud, we noticed WHOIS lookups failing the past day and a bit. This failure was noticed using various utilities across various platforms and locations. Further investigations shows the gTLD registry data format had changed for .net and .com domains, specifically the format line to the registrar’s WHOIS server. As per the ICANN specifications, and how it was, this should be the registry format (bold for the sake of…

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