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EBay Gets Phished Out Of The Water
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-09
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Online auction house eBay just got suckered by a phishing scam and they're not sure why. Apparently, the scam site was so good, they thought it was one of their own. It does make one wonder about the people working in eBay's security section.
Security dude Richi Jennings dropped eBay a line in November about the situation with the odd website called ebaychristmas.net(which is now down). Apparently, when Jennings first sent word to eBay about the site, they said it was legitimate. So either eBay wasn't paying attention or they were really fooled.
The key to this site, registered with Swiss-based Joker.com, was that it ran on a number of botnet linked PCs that had been infected. This made it extraordinarily difficult for eBay to slap down because as soon as one would go down, another would pop up and eBay said Joker.com wasn't being particularly helpful in the matter.
A story written by Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service had Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for eBay saying the company had been working to take down the phishing site since Nov. 8th. Jennings reported the site on Nov 25th.
Jennings posted additional information to his blog very early on Thursday morning. He said it took 13 days for the site to go down. Jennings questioned eBay's working on the site since Nov. 8th. He said the real solution was removing the DNS entry because while legitimate companies balance their load among multiple IP addresses, this group was using it to get around the "take down."
He said in the end, Verisign, who controls the .net top-level domain, "stepped in and removed authority for the ebay.Christmas.net from Joker.com." Now it's "no such host."
Jennings says in end, "it's important for domain registrars to act quickly and responsibly when abuses such as phishing are brought to their attention. Authorities upstream of the registrar need to be able to exercise some sort of leverage if they don't act."
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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