Cybercriminals Create 57,000 Fake Sites Each Week

wiredmikey writes "In a recent investigation, it was discovered that cybercriminals are creating 57,000 new 'fake' websites each week looking to imitate and exploit approximately 375 high-profile brands. eBay and Western Union were the most targeted brands, making up 44 percent of exploited brands discovered. Visa, Amazon, Bank of America and PayPal also heavily targeted by cybercriminals. Banks comprise the majority of fake websites by far with 65 percent of the total. Online stores and auction sites came in at 27 percent, with eBay taking the spot as the No. 1 most targeted brand on the Web today."

Comments

Is someone working on fixing this?

[kheldan]

I know that DNS vulnerabilities are being addressed finally. Wouldn't a good next step be to eliminate domain registrars that allow these sorts of sites to get created in the first place?

sure...

[damn_registrars]

Wouldn't a good next step be to eliminate domain registrars that allow these sorts of sites to get created in the first place?

I agree whole-heartedly that something should be done about the crooked and complacent registrars. The problem is, who should take the action? The most logical step is ICANN, since they handle registrar accreditation, except they have shown repeatedly that they will not take any meaningful steps. And of course, ICANN only does accreditation for registrars of the largest TLDs (for now), so anything from another country's list of TLDs is beyond their jurisdiction (and soon pretty much everything will be beyond their jurisdiction).

So if ICANN won't do it, who then should? It is pretty well impossible to take legal action against the registrars and expect anything meaningful to come of that, so unless you want to advocate vigilante justice you're just SOL.