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Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

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Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

#131

Post by Flimm »

austin-cheney wrote: post #113
Flimm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The malicious website can stop the Referer header from being sent by setting the Referrer-Policy header to "no-referrer". Also, redirects apparently wouldn't include a Referer header any way, according to kbolino's comment.

First of all you shouldn't rely on HTTP headers for traffic identification as that makes a bunch of assumptions. Secondly, look at the example 301 on MDN which contains no identifying information: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/301 Redirected traffic is coming from one or more dedicated locations performing the redirection. The source of redirection is still identifiable by IP address. So, i…

I don't think that's correct. If server A redirects to server B, then server B does not obtain the IP address of server A, only the IP address of the client. Also, the client does not send a "301 request" to server B, it sends a normal GET request. The 301 code only applies to responses, not requests.

Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

#132

Post by xg15 »

TrueDuality wrote: post #31

As others have mentioned this is likely one of a couple of scenarios, roughly ordered by my guess on likelihood: - Attempting to use your legitimate content and services to improve the SEO rank of other domains (even unrelated ones). This can usually be checked by looking for a sitemap.xml, there will be pages not redirected to your site that contain pages of links. - Closely following the above, the pages may not be…

Just speculating here, but would it be possible that the redirecting domains could actually overtake the original site in terms of search rank, etc? If yes, this could be preparation for a semi-targeted phishing campaign:

1) set up plausibly-named fake domains that redirect to example.com

2) ensure that the fake domains rank higher than the original domain for "example" searches.

3) after a while, people have gotten used to accessing the service through the fake domains or might even think those are the official domains.

4) pull up the net by replacing the redirect with phishing pages. Suddenly, everyone googling for the service will end up on a phishing site, without any obvious way to fix the situation.

Phishers could also run this scheme for lots of sites in parallel, without needing to have some specific interest in any of them.

Edit: Seems like the semantics of the 301 redirect should prevent this from working though.

Re: Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

#135

Post by wifipunk »

pinoy420 wrote: post #115
motoxpro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Yeah that's genius. It would definitely catch me as I just visit the domain to see if it's legit and don't think about redirects. e.g. gogle.com -> google.com

Nothing new. I used to create fake, for example, myspace login pages, host them somewhere, harvest the credentials then redirect back to myspace.com login

I used to do that too!! I wasn't malicious enough to do anything with them so I would just login to random accounts and poke around and occasionally show my friends by logging into the accounts of people we knew.
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