Domain name abuse and how to counter it
We as a hoster see this happen on a regular basis and intervene several times for this as well. Domain name abuse. Of spoofing other services such as a bank or PayPal. Or the imitation of a webshop. In the latest news we see the same thing happening with a fake RDW website.
An easy website to renew your license plate was the idea of a malicious person. For only 19.95 you could easily arrange this online via a fake website in the house style of RDW. However, this was simply a trick to get so many people to pay 19.95. Without renewing your license plate.
Hosting websites like this often happens abroad but also on Dutch soil. MijnHostingPartner.nl always does its best to deal with requests that come in from the SIDN and other sources as quickly as possible and take them offline when justified.
SSL certificates
With the thousands of websites springing up, spoofing websites are also part of it. Often they copy the original website, the logo, the font in this way. Nothing is safe. Nowadays, with publishers of SSL certificates such as Lets Encrypt, the SSL certificate is also slowly losing its value. Where people used to be trained by the government to look out for the green lock in the browser bar, that is no longer sufficient. In most browsers, the lock is not even green anymore. Parties such as Lets Encrypt can request an SSL certificate within a few clicks, with only a domain check being performed. This way, even rogue websites can have an SSL certificate. Council is therefore to the SSL certificate further check and not blindly trust.
Webshops and company websites we also recommend to choose the paid option from one of ourhosting packages for these reasons. There is namely more validated by a paid agency than a free certificate provider.
Domain name monitoring service
One way to ensure that your brand or business does not suffer from this is to purchase the Domain Name Monitoring Service from us. This is a service we can provide to actively scan against domains (even those not hosted with us) and prevent this from happening. This way, new domains that are registered with your brand name in them are immediately blacklisted and we can quickly take action to prevent this. If you are interested in this, please contact our helpdesk.
Reporting to Google
What is always a possibility when you have become a victim of this is to report it to Google. Many of these rogue domains also do their best to get as high as possible in the organic search results. That is also how they try to make customers or victims. In fact, for longer small keywords, pages in Google can be gotten on the first page fairly quickly if there is already some experience in that area. With each update of Google, this becomes more difficult. But today, this is still possible for many malicious people to exploit. Reporting to Google allows a website to be removed from the search results. Taking the domain name offline can be done through the organization behind this.
In conclusion, always pay attention to where you make your online purchases and which websites you are directed to. It is and remains a battle that is never completely over. But together with organizations such as the SIDN we can constantly tighten the steps and keep the number of duped customers as small as possible.
Have you become interested in the Domain Name Monitoring service or an SSL certificate? Then feel free to contact us via the online chat or via the ticket system.Inspiration for this article: SIDN
