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18 September 2003

Verisign Hijacks Mistyped Domains

Domain registrar Verisign has come under intense criticism this week after resolving requests for non-existent .COM and .NET domains to an error page featuring their own search engine, Site Finder. Normally, these requests would be resolved by the user's own browser, typically delivering a "page not found" or DNS error.

>> In his article about the development, VeriSign's New Site Finder Redirects Bad Domain Traffic, Danny Sullivan reports:

<snippet>"The move, only days old, is already proving controversial. VeriSign is being accused of hijacking traffic, though who exactly "owns" the traffic to non-existent domains is entirely unclear."</snippet>

New Zealand based ISP's have already made their feelings clear on the subject, calling it "sabotage" and claiming it will assist spammers:

<snippet>"Some network operators are calling this 'typo-squatting'. While on the face of it this seems quite a simple move, network operators are up in arms. ICONZ has already introduced software patches to block the move for its customers, says engineering manager John Russell.

'It's nothing more than sabotage and we're treating it as such.'

Russell says the problem is that instead of non-valid domain names resolving as errors, they return a Site Finder search page.

'That means we can't do a simple check to find out if names are valid or not.'

The problem with that is that most anti-spam products conduct this simple test as their first move in determining whether an email is spam or not. That means spammers will have a free shot at getting their mail past one of the most basic weapons in the anti-spam armoury."</snippet> Ouch!

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