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Targeted spam or just a new spam filter evading technique?

16
Oct
2011

I own a couple of domains for various private activities, among these, my personal blog. They don’t get much traffic, but I receive a lot of spam on these domains. One of these spams escaped the spam filters because it was specially crafted. The email was sent from an email address of a domain which was registered by a company which sells other domains (no, it is not a domain registrar, just a domain troll).

The domain advertised for sale is “bestfreeonlinestorage.com”. Funny that a domain name can be so long – this one contains 4 words (not counting “.com”).

What really made me look deeper to this email was this sentence: “Based on your contact information I see that you own <my domain>, correct?”

And this is pretty much everything what this email has to do with me. I have absolutely nothing to do with online storage, and of course the same with free online storage.

So, I assume that they take all domains from some registrar, get the email addresses and send this semi-personalized email.

All links in the email seem to be personalized as well, in order to track the interested persons.

 

Seeing that the domain is actually a view for the this domain, I clicked on the logo of the company which provides the service.

If you visit the website (of course, not by clicking on the links) we see that they sell a lot of domains.

 

I don’t like such companies which collect domains based on keywords, register them for some pennies and then try to sell them for a lot of money. But when they also try to advertise these domains by sending spam, then I do have a real problem with them.

I strongly advise everybody who might sometime need a certain domain name to not fall for such offers, no matter how cheap they are. If there is no request, there will be no offer. There is actually absolutely no difference between spams which advertise Viagra, Watches or domain names. They are all spams !

 

Sorin Mustaca

Data Security Expert

 

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