Phishers Registering Their Malicious Sites A Cause For Concern

According to researchers at security firm Netcraft, there is a common practice by cyber-criminals, intending to launch phishing assaults, to register the domain name of their own phishing sites.

Different from the other typical scenarios of phishing sites such as hacked servers, exploitation of non-chargeable web-hosting, and open redirects, phishing sites with domain names of their own could be more difficult to eliminate as both the domain owner and website owner are false. Only the DNS and hosting providers as also the registrar for domain names are capable of shutting down the site that are also expected to help each other in the job.

State the researchers that popular domains' operation is usually divided amid a registry that runs the DNS query-responding infrastructure, and domain name supplying registrars that further enable domain owners to keep records of their activities.

Meanwhile, to eliminate phishing domains, there is no direct involvement of registries rather they refer the domains to their respective registrars.

However, there are no big hassles in becoming a domain name registrar, consequently, numerous web design companies, hosting firms, as also resellers of domain names are managing to deal with their registrations. Say the security experts that all registrars might not act fast enough against complaints of abuse. In fact, in unnatural instances, they themselves might be aiding the fraudsters in illegal operations.

Naturally, phishers go on targeting top-level domains and registrars of particular domains and also increasingly abuse services of sub-domains to host and manage their phishing sites.

A new research by the Anti-Phishing Working Group found that of the total 30,454 phishing domains, phishers themselves registered as many as 5,591. Also the agency found that phishing often occurs on hijacked web servers that the site-operators remain unaware of.

Consequently, phishers enjoy hosting services free of cost as also attempts to remedy the circumstances are disrupted since suspending a hosting account or domain name could create problems for other legitimate sites.

Hence this issue, which raises concern, needs to be carefully watched since phishers presently are attempting at obtaining domain registrants' passwords with an added danger of committing possible domain name thefts.

Related article: Phishers Expand Their Sphere of Attacks

» SPAMfighter News - 7/4/2009