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It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

krebsonsecurity.com

61–70 of 184 posts

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#61

Sounds to me like this researcher is going to be brought up on charges. Well deserved charges. We don’t know what he did with this domain before he contacted krebs. He very well could be covering his tracks and creating plausible deniability. You break the law, you go to jail. Simple as that. They aught to make an example out of him.

> Well deserved charges

Who was the victim?

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#62
post #17

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. > Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley. A minor nit: Many of these ci…

I would assume the LA City one was chosen because it’s still shorter than Los Angeles and it also differentiates from LA County. Much of the LA metropolitan area is within the county limits but not part of the city of LA.

I would think it also needs to differentiate from Louisiana.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#63

Good reporting, until this paragraph: Now consider what a well-funded adversary could do on Election Day armed with a handful of .gov domains for some major cities in Democrat strongholds within key swing states: The attackers register their domains a few days in advance of the election, and then on Election Day send out emails signed by .gov from, say, miami.gov (also still available) informing residents that bombs…

[flagged]

> Republicans in power attempt to suppress votes, especially in inner cities. Democrats do not.

Citation?

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#64

Good reporting, until this paragraph: Now consider what a well-funded adversary could do on Election Day armed with a handful of .gov domains for some major cities in Democrat strongholds within key swing states: The attackers register their domains a few days in advance of the election, and then on Election Day send out emails signed by .gov from, say, miami.gov (also still available) informing residents that bombs…

The Houston Chronicle reported today that the Texas GOP plans to purchase several domains resembling democratic candidates and run active disinformation campaigns against them using fake campaign sites[0]. Might’ve had something to do with it. 0: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article...

Another news story today is the lawsuit against the "Devin Nunes' Cow/Mother" Twitter accounts run by anonymous DNC personnel. In each of these incidents the "disinformation" label is used by partisan officials and obsessively repeated by the media (because the creator's identity is not placed in large font at the top), but anyone who looks at it themselves can clearly see that such is satire and opposition material.

This one is particularly great. Made by an enterprising private individual. https://joebiden.info/

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#65
post #17

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. > Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley. A minor nit: Many of these ci…

The city of Lafayette's police department (in the SF East Bay) accepts crime tip emails using a Gmail address (94549TIP@gmail.com). It's plastered on all their police cars, even though the city and police department have an official domain. Though even that is a .org domain, lovelafayette.org.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Republicans in power attempt to suppress votes, especially in inner cities. Democrats do not. Citation?

Here's about a hundred: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/20....

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov. This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the…

In Norway, people employed by the local municipalities have email adresses that are literally of the style $firstname[.$middlename].$lastname@employee.$municipalityName.municipality.no where "employee" and "municipality" are literal strings (in Norwegian) and the others are variables. It's incredible, I've seen people with 50 character long email addresses.

If you want to reschedule your Canadian citizenship ceremony, this is the address to email: RCC.DNCitSCRScheduling-ConvocationSCRCitRN.IRCC@cic.gc.ca

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#69
post #17

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. > Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley. A minor nit: Many of these ci…

The city of Lafayette's police department (in the SF East Bay) accepts crime tip emails using a Gmail address (94549TIP@gmail.com). It's plastered on all their police cars, even though the city and police department have an official domain. Though even that is a .org domain, lovelafayette.org.

So an email address that looks like a fraud (or just random) and a domain name that looks like a porn site.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#70

This is what I used to do back in the day, to get high pagerank(remember that?) In Google

If we go back to the original PageRank algorithm, I don't think it would be affected by this attack. The original algorithm just counts the number of links (or number of sites making links), not the TLDs. So a .com site would be just as good as a .gov site.
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