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    Home Cybersecurity
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    Beware Fake Domain Renewal Notices

    Written by

    Larry Seltzer
    Published July 16, 2007
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      Thanks to the folks at Domain Name Wire for blogging about a serious scam designed to steal money from domain name owners. You could say its a new sort of phish.

      Domain renewal scams are not a new thing. Because whois information is public, unscrupulous registrars have, for years, harvested the information in it and sent renewal notices to unwitting customers of other domains. If you “renew” you actually end up transferring the domain name and perhaps incurring additional charges.

      Back in 2003, the FTC went after DROA (Domain Registry of America), ironically a Canadian company, for sending out such notices. DROA actually sent these notices in direct U.S. mail, not e-mail, and theyre not the only ones to send out paper notices. I personally have received many such notices over the years.

      /zimages/4/28571.gifThe first, and most famous case of domain theft, has been written up in a book. Click here to read more.

      This new scam comes in the form of an e-mail from “Domain Renewal” telling you that you need to renew your domain. It is designed to look official and tries to draw you in to renew the domain, but the problem is that you didnt register the domain with Domain Renewal.

      How can this be? Domain Renewal claims to be able to renew your domain with your current registrar (although they usually seem to say that it is ISPs that register domains, which is not generally true). “When Domain Renewal extends your domain no information will be changed in the “Whois” information section. The domain will be extended for 1 year. You will therefore continue with your current supplier. You may also request your Internet Service Provider to renew the domain for you.“

      This is nonsense. Domain renewals cant be performed by proxy, and thank goodness they cant. The system is increasingly designed to make it difficult for third parties to perform transfers, changes of authoritative DNS and other serious operations. Why would they allow a third party to renew a domain? And if a domain is locked, which is increasingly the default situation, no such operations will be possible without explicit interaction between the customer and the actual registrar.

      So whats the point of it all if they cant steal the domain? In all likelihood theyre taking your renewal money and, shall we say, keeping it. I cant imagine what else they can do with it. I called Domain Renewal at a phone number in Belgium but there was no answer. Domain Renewals Web site lists locations in Belgium and the Seychelles, a very nice place to keep money.

      I talked to Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows, who stressed the importance of knowing who you bought your domain from. It seems like an obvious point, but there are a lot of domain owners who dont know this basic fact. Tucows has it especially hard because they are both a retailer and a wholesaler. For instance, people who buy hosting from another service can often register a domain as part of the same process, but the Web host may only be a domain reseller for a separate company.

      Very often customers in these situations dont know who their actual supplier is. Tucows may show up in the whois record, but thats not necessarily who the customer should be dealing with. And certainly they shouldnt be dealing with someone who is not in the whois record and with whom they have never done business.

      Domain Renewal acknowledges this situation and claims to be the solution for it:

      It is not uncommon for companies to have purchased their domains with different suppliers which makes it even harder to keep track of their domain portfolio. DRS will find and renew your domains for you. We make agreements with ISP all over the world to renew our customers domain names.
      DRS refers to their “automated renewal system.”

      If youre unhappy with having to protect yourself against such scams, Im with you, but thats life, buddy. Companies that engage in domain fraud may or may not pay the price some day, but it doesnt change the fact that you need to be alert and know enough to protect yourself. The FTC wont do it. Know who your domain suppliers are and be alert to whom your correspondence is coming from.

      Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983.

      /zimages/4/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms for the latest security news, reviews and analysis. And for insights on security coverage around the Web, take a look at eWEEK.com Security Center Editor Larry Seltzers blog Cheap Hack

      More from Larry Seltzer

      Larry Seltzer
      Larry Seltzer
      Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever since—,much to his own amazement— He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.For several years, he wrote corporate software for Mathematica Policy Research (they're still in business!) and Chase Econometrics (not so lucky) before being forcibly thrown into the consulting market. He bummed around the Philadelphia consulting and contract-programming scenes for a year or two before taking a job at NSTL (National Software Testing Labs) developing product tests and managing contract testing for the computer industry, governments and publication.In 1991 Larry moved to Massachusetts to become Technical Director of PC Week Labs (now eWeek Labs). He moved within Ziff Davis to New York in 1994 to run testing at Windows Sources. In 1995, he became Technical Director for Internet product testing at PC Magazine and stayed there till 1998.Since then, he has been writing for numerous other publications, including Fortune Small Business, Windows 2000 Magazine (now Windows and .NET Magazine), ZDNet and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey.

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