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Category: whois

Domain registration details

When enough is enough?

When enough is enough?

The US Internet Fraud Complaint Center reported, for January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2001: During this same time period, the IFCC has referred 16,775 complaints of fraud, the majority of which was committed over the Internet or similar online service. The total dollar loss from all referred cases of fraud was $17.8 million, with a median dollar loss of $435 per complaint. (…) Internet auction fraud was by far the most reported offense, comprising 42.8% of referred complaints. Non-deliverable…

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WHOIS, Proxies and the GDPR – how consumers lost Security and Privacy

WHOIS, Proxies and the GDPR – how consumers lost Security and Privacy

Artists Against 419 has to say this very clearly: There can be no consumer privacy and security while ICANN Registrars are the custodians of trust on the internet. ICANN has allowed a situation to develop that’s had the exact opposite effect of what the European privacy regulators aimed for, the protection of natural consumer privacy. In turn, this has further not only created a situation where consumers may be trivially deprived of privacy, but also security. Let’s look at this situation with quick examples.

DNS Abuse Dominoes

DNS Abuse Dominoes

While ICANN, the regulators and the various interest groups are debating the definitions of DNS abuse, what constitutes a security threat and is within their responsibility (or rather not), what’s wrong in this area, fraudsters don’t care about these shenanigans. They’re exploiting DNS to their own advantage in well defined illegal activities. The rules made when the Internet was young, seems unable to keep the steps with current realities. The divide between the ideal Internet in the regulators’ model and…

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fastdocuments24hrs.com
What Protection Does ICANN Offer The Consumer?

What Protection Does ICANN Offer The Consumer?

On the 20th of Jan 2018 we sent an email to Tucows and the reseller SmarterASP on domains used for websites selling both legitimate and forged passports, visas, drivers licenses etc. They also claimed to sell forged currency. The reality is this is a well known scam used by Cameroonian fraudsters. Invariably these lead to later extortion where the fraudsters impersonate the authorities and fees/fines are payable.

SlizzySlimzy12@gmail.com – Slizzy Slimzy: Why Your Motorcycle Will Not Arrive

SlizzySlimzy12@gmail.com – Slizzy Slimzy: Why Your Motorcycle Will Not Arrive

Would you trust a Nigerian rapper to successfully run a diverse US and Indian located portfolio of businesses that sells electronic devices and motorcycles, as well as several logistics companies and banks? If your answer to this question is a resounding “no”, then you may have potentially just saved thousands of dollars. By typing the email address slizzyslimzy12@gmail.com into a search engine, to the untrained eye it is possible to see evidence of a “young, talented Afro hip hop artist”…

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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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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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