Beware of new style phishing email – Domain Deletion

By Ed | November 3rd, 2008 | Category: Domain Registration, Email Systems, Privacy & Security | No Comments »

There’s a new type of phishing email doing the rounds, and it’s targeting website owners.

It purports to be from the “enom Team” and offers a link to www.enom.com that behind the link connects to ” www.enom.com.sys43.ru ” and obviously has nothing to do with the real enom.com

enom.com are one of the UK’s primary internet domain name registrars, and their website is now carrying a big yellow warning banner on the home page, with instructions for what to do if you inadvertently clicked on the link in one of those emails.

Both Gaz and myself have been receiving several of these emails daily, on each of our busiest email addresses, therefore the crowd behind this scam have been out and about email harvesting. They also display excellent English language skills (without the usual give-away bad grammar and spelling) and may have copied the main text from a genuine registrar’s email. The examples we have received have the following opening paragraph -

Dear user,

On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 15:23:07 +0300 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain. Whenever we receive a complaint, we are required by ICANN regulations to initiate an investigation as to whether the contact data displaying in the Whois database is valid data or not. If we find that there is invalid or missing data, we contact both the registrant and the account holder and inform them to update the information.

As always, being addressed as “Dear (not my real and full name)” should be the first clue that the email you have received is not genuine.