Company’s domain registrations are probably futile.
This week news broke that hackers stole account information on perhaps six million Instagram users and are selling the data. A group of hackers being called DoxAGram is responsible for the breach.
In the wake of the breach and disclosure, Instagram is registering lots of domain names with DoxAGram in them. It’s unclear why Instagram is choosing the domains that it is.
For example, it has registered domains across many of Uniregistry’s top level domains, including doxagram.christmas, doxagram.hiphop and doxagram.mom. It has also registered domains from other registries, such as doxagram.guru. Yet it has left some obvious ones off the registration list, such as doxagram.store.
Perhaps it is still going through the process of registering domains, but I’m not sure that registering domains across nearly 1,000 top level domains makes sense.
Joshua Davis says
This is bizzare. What do they hope to accomplish with registering those domains?
John Berryhill says
When your security “experts” make money registering names, then you’re going to register names.
[email protected] says
This is interesting. There must be more to this story. Is the target company attempting to capture traffic that they think might somehow be generated as a result of the hack? This makes me wonder if there is some malware aspect to this hack.
DM says
It is called copycat prevention or bit-squatting defense.
Ken Hansen says
Apparently the registrations were to prevent Doxagram from finding acceptable look-alike domains. They were booted from multiple TLDs… http://www.thedailybeast.com/hackers-claim-apparent-instagram-fightback-will-not-stop-them-selling-stolen-doxagram-data
Hackers Claim Apparent Instagram Fightback Will Not Stop Them Selling Stolen ‘Doxagram’ Data
Daily Beast – 7h ago
Along with its parent company Facebook, Instagram has seemingly registered hundreds of different Doxagram domains, according to online records.