Brian Krebs digs into a zero-click network of mostly typo domains.
Last month Brian Krebs wrote about .cm domains and other typos on his site KrebsOnSecurity.com, building on research done by Matthew Chambers of SecureWorks.
The story reviewed a number of typo domain names and where they pointed. They all seemed to forward to other pages that sometimes led to malware. In other words, “zero-click” parking.
Krebs reviewed some of the domains that the typos forwarded to. He found that they were all registered with the email address [email protected]*. Krebs entered that email address into the “forgot password” tool on Yahoo email and it revealed that the backup email address was k*****ng@mediabreakaway[dot]com.
Media Breakaway is Scott Richter’s company. It owns the domain parking service The Parking Place, which uses a combination of monetization techniques.
A reader on Kreb’s site noted that four years of access logs for the network of domain names were available for download on the hosting provider’s site. Krebs was able to download it and Chambers reviewed the data.
The data show that the network received about 12 million visits during the first quarter of 2018.
It’s possible some of these are for non-.cm domain names or on traffic funneled through those domains. Any way you look at it, though, it’s a lot of traffic.
* This type of research won’t be possible if Whois goes dark after GDPR.
Sam says
Interesting. I own some good CM domains and don’t get any traffic.
Joseph Peterson says
Speaking of zero-click parking that directs to malware … when are parking companies in this industry going to take responsibility for this abuse and fix the problem? I’ve been fairly vocal about this for years, but it’s been crickets from the companies earning money through this practice.
I’d like to see the major parking providers pledge to eradicate it from their monetization altogether, if they can’t police it properly. (And they’ve shown no indication that they can or even try.)
Is there a way for domain owners to opt out of zero-click, parking companies?
schollik says
This is pure Propaganda & Agitation! .cm Typos have no traffic at all.
It´s just a cheap Marketing Gag to move domainers to register names
with this creepy expensive and traffic-less extension.