Security Information Vulnerability Research Security Blog

Domain hijackers found EU Presidency and Summit .com domains

October 20th, 2006 by , Filed under: Commentary, Web

This Friday is the day when European Union Heads of State or Government had a remarkable meeting in Lahti, Finland (Reuters article about the summit). Behind the scenes domain hijackers have found related EU Presidency and Summit addresses.

Domain eu2006.com was registered three days before ASEM 6 Summit, when the real domain is eu2006.fi, of course. The registration was made from Delaware state. The portal site spreaded screensavers as .exe files, WinAntiVirus Pro 2006 etc. We can only imagine what the .exe files included.
The situation is same with ASEM 6 Summit domain (the summit was in Helsinki on 11th Sep). When the real domain name is www.asem6.fi domain www.asem6.com was registered in July from St. Petersburg. [may generate pop-ups]
An interesting detail is that organisation behind this presidency, Prime Minister’s Office, uses domains vnk.fi and valtioneuvosto.fi, but www.valtioneuvosto.com is registered and for sale. ;-)

I have contacted the Presidency Office and Prime Minister’s Office before ASEM summit already, but they didn’t see the case worth of replying.

And what about Eu2007.com? WHOIS data says it was registered in 2004 already:

Registrant:
STRATEKS CORPORATION
P.O.BOX 3083
VANCOUVER, British Columbia V6B 3X6
Canada

This fitness/dating/credit card/poker/travel site is Finnish language. These examples confirm that domain hijackers know what is happening in small countries too…

Share
  • Dan

    Uhm, that’s not what domain hijacking is. Domain hijacking is when you take over somebody’s domain name.

    In this case somebody registered a different domain that just happens to be similar. Ethically, perhaps a slight bit questionable. But from a legal basis, absolutely nothing wrong with it. Which is probably why your phone calls went un-returned.

    If the summit leaders don’t have the forethought to register all the TLD variants of their domain name, then they get what they deserve.

  • sunshine

    Eh? This is domain squatting which if used in a “bad” fashion is, well, abuse.

    How many variants of a domain can YOU register?

  • http://networksecurity.typepad.com/ Juha-Matti

    Yes, this is more a squatting case which prevents the government to register similar names, because they were not wise enough to register them when planning the summit.

  • Share







  • Categories


Security RSS Subscribe