[P2P-F] please note hijacking of our address ...

Sat Feb 19 21:27:27 CET 2011

In this particular case, it appears that someone is squatting on http://foundation.net, a common practice, and the site is set up so that all URLs of form http://*.foundation.net bring up the same material rather than any sort of error page.  There's probably not even a foundation.net site, but a shared IP address that is the target of a flock of URLs for the domains being squatted on.

The malicious ones could be set up to (1) attempt download of malware -- this could be one of those -- or (2) impersonate a similarly-named site in an effort to perpetrate an identity or account theft.  This is evidently not one of the latter and it appears to be an opportunistic sort of spam in the weeds of the web.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Rose [mailto:samuel.rose at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 10:49
To: dennis.hamilton at acm.org; P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] please note hijacking of our address ...

p2p foundation doesn't own foundation.net so it is actually not a hijack, but a kind of spoofing where they are using a domain that looks close to, but is not exactly your actual domain

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamilton at acm.org> wrote:
> Subdomains are not issued by domain registries.  However, a site tenant might sublet a subdomain to someone.  I have a web site that allows me unlimited subdomains.  These can also be used as anchors for implementation of add-on domains.  E.g., my domain for <http://nfoWorks.org> is targeted at my actual web site as <http://nfoworks.nfocentrale.com> and that maps onto <http://nfocentrale.com/nfoworks/>.  I don't publicize the subdomains because I don't want people to bookmark them:  if I move or re-organize the site, such bookmarks would no longer work.
>
> The address has not been hijacked.  The address p2p.foundation.net is a different address.  If p2pfoundation.net had been routed to an unauthorized place, that would be hijacking.
>
> What it looks like in the current instance is that the holder of foundation.net simply routes unimplemented subdomains to a generic home page.  There are sites like this all over the Internet, some intentionally designed to make fruit from mistyped URLs.
>
> Michel, did you see a scraped version of the <http://p2pFoundation.net/Category:Peergovernance> page or did you see a version of the page that now appears, the one with the same content  from <http://foundation.net> with possibly-different formatting?
>
>  - Dennis
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org 
> [mailto:p2p-foundation-bounces at lists.ourproject.org] On Behalf Of 
> Samuel Rose
> Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 07:24
> To: P2P Foundation mailing list
> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] please note hijacking of our address ...
>
> Does P2PF own the subdomain p2p.foundation.net ?
>
> [ ... ]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> P2P Foundation - Mailing list
> http://www.p2pfoundation.net
> https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
>

--
--
Sam Rose
Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
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