Attackers Will Always Abuse Major Events in our Lifes

Published: 2021-09-02
Last Updated: 2021-09-02 07:12:41 UTC
by Xavier Mertens (Version: 1)
2 comment(s)

All major events in our daily life are potential sources of revenue for attackers. When elections or major sports events are organized, attackers will surf on these waves and try to make some profit or collect interesting data (credentials). It's the same with major meteorological phenomena. The hurricane "Ida" was the second most intense hurricane to hit the state of Louisiana on record, only behind "Katrina"[1].

I had a quick look at the recently created domains in the ".com" TLD. First I searched for domains that contain the word "hurricane":

Registrations compared to last months:

Month Registrations
August 109
July 102
June 66
May 63

Now let's have a look at registrations based on "hurricane" and "ida":

Month Registrations
August 15
July 0
June 0
May 0
   

Here is the list of domains registered in August:

hurricaneidahelp.com
hurricaneidarelief.com
hurricaneidafund.com
hurricaneida2021.com
hurricaneidaclaim.com
hurricaneidadamage.com
hurricaneidarecovery.com
hurricaneidaadjuster.com
hurricaneidalaw.com
hurricaneidalawyers.com
hurricaneidamoney.com
hurricaneidapublicadjusters.com
hurricaneidapublicadjusting.com
idahurricane.com
idahurricaneclaims.com

I did a quick check on those domains. Most of them are still parked domains at this time (they don't serve any content), another one is a redirect to a lawyer's company pretending to help you to get your money back in case of an accident.

Please be careful when looking for information about such major events, always cross-check the domain reputation to avoid problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ida

Xavier Mertens (@xme)
Senior ISC Handler - Freelance Cyber Security Consultant
PGP Key

2 comment(s)

Comments

@Xavier I am interested in gathering recent domain registrations, how do I gather this data?
try this: https://isc.sans.edu/api/recentdomains?json (it is in beta. not documented yet)

to search for a keyword: https://isc.sans.edu/api/recentdomains/today/keyword?json (just replace "keyword" with your keyword like "hurricane")

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