GoDaddy cracks down on close to 15,000 subdomains used by scammers

We know that with the rise of users on the Internet, scammers are also increasing in number. Also, users who are not aware of these scams click on suspicious links which lead them to frauds. You must have come across various links which seem to be fake from the outset just looking at the domain or subdomain that it uses. However, we cannot say the same about regular users who don’t know much about domains and branding.

For this reason, scammers have been using subdomains to create spammy landing pages which offer lucrative and exciting offers which tempts the user. In the end, this is nothing but a scam happening on a very large scale. Now, GoDaddy has come good for its users and shut down about 15,000 subdomains which were used for scamming purposes.

Reportedly, the subdomains were used for selling fake products. However, the interesting thing to note here is that the owners of these domains were not aware that their subdomains were used for scamming purpose. This was unearthed by a security researcher at Palo Alto Networks named Jeff White.

Jeff studied the habits of these spammers for almost two years during his research. He found out that these spammers would send bulk emails to users and lure them to click and buy those fake products.]

Talking about subdomains, these are prefix of domains and GoDaddy allows its users to create up to 100 subdomains per domain. For example, a subdomain for Flipweb.org can be Shop.flipweb.org or Blog.Flipweb.org.

Jeff White, after ending his research, submitted the findings to GoDaddy’s abuse team and GoDaddy was quick to take necessary action which was to take down all the subdomains.

On top of that, GoDaddy has reset passwords for all accounts whose subdomains were used in these spam and were not aware of it. This means that the users will not be able to gain access to those accounts anymore.

Source