This is a little bit backdated, and I believe Kim Komando has talked about this in the past, but it may not be so safe when it comes to searching for your favorite software.
Dan Goodin wrote up the article and it has images there for those who can see.
Even our beloved Thunderbird is targeted with a domain newer than Thunderbird’s actual domain.
When I went to search for Thunderbird to give someone the URL, I knew what I was looking for, and I believe it was before this problem.
My bigger question, who owns the TLD of .pw?
I was just on the phone with one of our people, and was asking them a serious question. That question is, why aren’t companies snatching these domains like .shop and .email to help their brand awareness? Target is a shopping site. Keep the .com, but buy the .shop. Google has email services. Buy .email for that, keep the .com but have .email redirecting people to the right place.
The fact that some of the TLD’s I’ve seen in spam are not even advertised elsewhere, I tell people to be weary of these others. If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t even waste your time!
The article is Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software and I think its worth the read.
The bigger question is, what is the tactic we should use if this is going to be a problem? Sound off in the comments!
This article will be placed in our EMHS list of articles for Febraury 3, as I feel it fits what we’re looking for. You’ll find it there as well as a new term we’ll add which is prevalent in the article and that term is Malvertisement. Look for these in this next week’s digest of EMHS updates.
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