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Archive for December, 2009

Avalanche Fast-flux and Blended Attacks

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Phishing attacks have become more sophisticated with the use of fast-flux botnets as resilient attack platforms. The fast-fluxing among hundreds of compromised computers which serve as proxies for phishing sites means that detection and shutdown become more difficult. One particular fast-flux botnet called Avalanche has received much attention in recent months ...

Expressions of Interest a Requirement for New gTLDs?

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Today ICANN published a draft model for soliciting Expressions of Interest for new generic top-level domains. According to the model, parties interested in submitting applications to acquire new gTLDs will be required to provide basic information about the application and a deposit of $55,000 which can be used as a ...

Paid Search Ads Can Lead to Fake Goods

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

MarkMonitor recently investigated to what extent popular product searches led to websites offering counterfeit and pirated goods via paid search ads. The research examined 20 of the top 1,000 product-related searches in 2008 and focused on paid search ads across the three major search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing. ...

Open Phishing Season

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

For retailers and consumers, Cyber Monday marked the beginning of the online holiday shopping season. For cybercriminals, however, it marked the opening of their winter phishing season. Here at MarkMonitor, we are currently seeing an uptick in cybercriminal activity targeting online retailers’ brands. Linked here is an example of a phish attack ...

Open Enrollment = Open Season for Scammers

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

You have to give scammers credit, as they are a creative bunch.  While most of us think of the annual open enrollment period for employee benefits as a non-event, scammers see it as an opportunity.   Just last month we’ve seen suspicious sites targeting employees of some of the largest corporations.  In ...

2009 Domain Name Year In Review

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

To say that it’s been quite a year in the world of domain names would be an understatement. From compromised ccTLD registries, to the delay of new gTLDs, some of the events of the past year have been surprising, while others could easily have been predicted.   Regardless of whether you could ...