Cameroon Typo-Squats all of .com

wayne writes "As reported on CircleID, the nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD. Will the owners of .co and .om follow?"

Comments

Re:Smart move.

[Pantero Blanco]

It's too bad that none of that is likely to trickle down.

From what I understand, the government there controls (well, attempts to) the broadcast channels pretty damn strictly, and voicing an opposition political opinion is generally called "libel" and involves jail time. Hoarding the TLD isn't a surprising move for them.

Company behind it

[rf0]

Looking at this is appears that a company called "NameView Inc" is supplying the ads from the IP block 72.51.27.0 - 72.51.27.255 http://www.nameview.com/

Prehaps calling them on +1 (309) 424-5497 might help to say what a bad idea this is or we can just block the IP range (which is now what I'm going to do)

Re:There's an easy fix for this...

[Ash-Fox]

Just edit your hosts file, and redirect *.cm to 127.0.0.1 in it. That way, even if you ever make that kind of typo on accident, you don't reward them for it.

Since when could the hosts file support wildcards?

BIND has a quick fix for this

[sa3]

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;google.cm. IN A
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6369
;; ANSWER SECTION:
google.cm. 518 IN A 72.51.27.58
zone "cm" IN { type delegation-only; };
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;google.cm. IN A
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 12264

Re:Not an issue.

[KiloByte]

Same reasons that Verisign's wildcard service was decried...

And, fortunately, the fix is exactly the same: Here's the default named.conf:

// From the release notes:
// Because many of our users are uncomfortable receiving undelegated answers
// from root or top level domains, other than a few for whom that behaviour
// has been trusted and expected for quite some length of time, we have now
// introduced the "root-delegations-only" feature which applies delegation-only
// logic to all top level domains, and to the root domain. An exception list
// should be specified, including "MUSEUM" and "DE", and any other top level
// domains from whom undelegated responses are expected and trusted.
// root-delegation-only exclude { "DE"; "MUSEUM"; };

So, this option will preemptively avoid all jerkwads like Verisign and Cameroon. The only question is, why this isn't enabled by default.