Typosquatting

Tonight, I mis-typed a URL and got a Bing screen offering loads of suggestions I wasn't interested in. What happened to my normal Windows can't find it screen?

I purposely typed a couple bad URL's. Most resulted in Bing screens, but a couple brought up similar-performing Comcast screens, again, offering to "fix" my typo.

Comcast suck anyway -- as has been the subject of some recent posts here, and they are history once the U-Verse installer gets here later this week....

Is it possible to set IE8 to disallow this behavior, or are we just stuck with it. It seems I had this problem in the past and was able to irradicate it, but I don't see any settings in IE that would obviously stop this behavior.

I guess I can just type the URL's correctly. But it just bugs me that companies got to try to make a buck by "suggesting" crap to me I am not interested in. Just say you couldn't find the damn thing I entered. That's all I want, or need.

Reply to
mpm
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Change your DNS provider.

Reply to
JeffM

Ditch the Insanity Exasperation and get a non-M$ browser..

Reply to
Robert Baer

MICRO$~1 is the Borg.

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Thanks, Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

Yes, but that doesn't mean you are safe if the URL looks OK. The bad guys are getting good. Some of them now avoid that layer of stupid mistakes.

If you are interested, google for >spear phishing

Reply to
Hal Murray

Also, what it looks like on the screen, and where it links to, can be two totally different things.

Reply to
mpm

That link "problem" has been around for quite a while..

Reply to
Robert Baer

When in doubt always examine the sourcecode directly and never use a mail client that renders HTML by default - there are too many latent malformed binary datastream exploits floating around even today.

But if you have actually typed in by hand

formatting link
you will read
formatting link
when you check it. That is why many systems ask you to type in your email address twice and then it compares them.

Only for the naieve. Several mail clients attempt to classify things as likely to be spam or a scam based on various heuristics and Bayesian learning classification. Unfortunately some of the real security bulletin messages also trip this warning mechanism too.

Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

lly

I thought all those forms made you type in your email address twice because it makes the web programmers validation job MUCH easier! If the two strings match, contain a single "@" sign, and a least one period, you're good to go.

Otherwise, if you think about it, parsing an email address to determine its validity could be a real bitch. Though I suspose there are some tools out there that might do a fairly decent job of this automatically?

I once looked into it for a project I was thinking about (that never got off the ground). Though I don't recall the specifics, it was absolutely much easier to just ask for both strings and compare them.

-mpm

Reply to
mpm

Pray tell, what is so "complicated" about an e-mail address? Parsing should take about 3 lines of code..

Reply to
Robert Baer

a

cally

e
s

Well... I agree it sure seems like that would be the case, but it isn't. (Or at least it didn't appear so to me at the time.) Tell you what: Give me those three lines of code, and I'll provide a valid format email address that will bust the code. :)

I agree that 95%+ of emails would be easy to parse. It's the oddball formats that make life difficult.

Reply to
mpm

I got one the other day that wanted me to authorize my child's account = and wanted SSNs, street address and much more. My kid no longer needs my permission for anything.

Reply to
josephkk

The comcast page is giving you a DNS failure. It can't find a record for the URL.

Try: OpenDNS which is a free third party DNS server.

--
It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

What kind of E-mail client do you use such that "opening" an E-mail can install malware? Some kind of Micro$hit stuff? ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Seems to me, pass one to detect illegal characters in code range zero to 255. Second pass to test 2 things: one "@" followed by one ".". Third pass to match "com", "org" etc trailer against table.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Or just don't broadcast your card number over the internet.

Hope This Helps! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

(Hal

avoid a

logically

spam.

can be

a

latent

things as

Bayesian

fairly

to

Here is a snippet from the standard:

" 3.4.1. Addr-spec specification

An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@", ASCII value 64) followed by an Internet domain. The locally interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom. If the string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it contains no characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded by atext

Resnick Standards Track [Page 16]

RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001

characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the quoted-string form SHOULD NOT be used. Comments and folding white space SHOULD NOT be used around the "@" in the addr-spec.

addr-spec =3D local-part "@" domain

local-part =3D dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part

domain =3D dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domain

domain-literal =3D [CFWS] "[" *([FWS] dcontent) [FWS] "]" [CFWS]

dcontent =3D dtext / quoted-pair

dtext =3D NO-WS-CTL / ; Non white space controls

%d33-90 / ; The rest of the US-ASCII %d94-126 ; characters not including "[", ; "]", or "\"

The domain portion identifies the point to which the mail is delivered. In the dot-atom form, this is interpreted as an Internet domain name (either a host name or a mail exchanger name) as described in [STD3, STD13, STD14]. In the domain-literal form, the domain is interpreted as the literal Internet address of the particular host. In both cases, how addressing is used and how messages are transported to a particular host is covered in the mail transport document [RFC2821]. These mechanisms are outside of the scope of this document.

The local-part portion is a domain dependent string. In addresses, it is simply interpreted on the particular host as a name of a particular mailbox. "

Looks pretty easy to parse conforming addresses. But then i make no = claim either way, i did not go into the full definitions of the components = which requires other RFCs.

Reply to
josephkk

logically

Didn't they just change the domain name to a more free-form format (.com, .org, etc. no longer needed)?

Reply to
krw

claim

which

(.com,

Not that i have heard. The issues i am hearing about is massive expansions of the Top Level Domains (TLDs) that ICANN wants to pursue. = It has become money issue. Income streams for ICANN vs Cost of defending against cybersquatters.

The handful of popular browsers automatically check for several common omissions, and try adding them in various combinations. Lots of registrars seem to be dropping "www." prefix though.

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

Exactly. I could have heard the details wrong (it was radio news - we did

3000 road miles over the last couple of weekends), but they said that soon yourcompany.anything domain names would soon be available. It's hard to cybersquat with .anything.

Was www ever needed?

Reply to
krw

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