Goldstein Report

Tag: spammers

  • .PW Becomes Spammer’s Favourite

    .PW, the ccTLD for the tiny Pacific island state of Palau that has been rebranded for the “professional web”, has been accused of becoming a haven for spammers.

    According to a report in TechNewsWorld, “antispam vendors are now working to update their filters, and the original registrar is assisting in their efforts.”

    .PW domains are offered relatively cheaply, making them attractive to spammers.

    “This came out of nowhere,” Eric Park, a senior antispam analyst with Symantec told TechNewsWorld.

    “If you look at our TLD distribution, .com, .ru, .info — those are usually at the top of our list,” he said.

    “But PW was by far the runaway number — even more than .com,” Park added.

    According to the report, “not only is Symantec bolstering its filters to block the spam, but it’s also working with the owner of the domain to help curb abuse of it.”

    “The registrar, from what I can tell, is interested in action to take the spammers down,” he said. “Not all registrars care, but these guys seem interested in working with us to shut them out because it’s damaging the brand they’re trying to push.”

    To read the TechNewsWorld report in full, go to:
    www.technewsworld.com/story/Island-Nations-Web-Domain-Now-Paradise-for-Spammers-78073.html

  • Dynamic Dolphin A spammers choice

    As the domain industry grows so does the underbelly of the industry,  spamming increasing and with less restrictions from registrars becoming a major problem.

    Out of the 15,000 spam-advertised domains we examined, nearly half — 7,142 names — were registered through a Broomfield, Colo. company called Dynamic Dolphin. As I noted in my previous story, Dynamic Dolphin is the seventh most-popular registrar among spammers who provide patently false information in their public WHOIS records.

    Data collected by Knujon, an anti-spam outfit that tries to convince registrars to deep-six spam sites, shows that spammers are increasingly registering sites through a handful of domain privacy services that refuse to provide a direct method to contact domain holders.