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  1. Fraudsters use encoded urls to target Barclays accounts

    Customers of Barclays Bank have received electronic mails that use url encoding and a widely publicised bug in Internet Explorer to obscure the name of the taregt fraud site. The use of url encoding seems to be an innovation for this type of mail, albeit a predictable one.

    Viewing the source code of the e-mail link will usually reveal the hoax, showing the target URL is unrelated to the bank. In this case, the e-mail link is encoded with hexadecimal numbers, with each encoded character beginning with "%". Thus, the source code looks like:

    
http://ibank.barclays.co.uk%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01

%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01@%77%77%77%2E%6E%65%77%79%65%72
%73%6D%2E%63%6F%6D:%38%30/%31%2C%2C%6C%6F%67%6F%6E%2C%30%30%2E
%70%68%70
    The '%01' characters exploit a bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser which obscures the appearence of the url. The enocded characters makes it tricky for recipients to spot the "@" sign and "://" that give away the concealed URL of the target web page. The real URL is 
    
http://www.newyersm.com:80/1,,logon,00.php
    which no longer resolves, but previously was in a netblock owned by Affinity Internet, Inc.

    (more...)

    Posted by Rich Miller on 9th January, 2004 in Security Share

  2. Large Hosts Ease Domain Discounting, But Others Now at $4

    While some providers continue to sell domain names at a loss to acquire customers, the industry's larger players are retreating a bit from their price-slashing ways of 2003.

    Go Daddy, the current volume leader among registrars, recently returned to $8.95 after briefly lowering its prices to $7.95 in an apparent response to price cuts by EV1Servers and Hostway. Last month EV1Servers hiked its domain pricing from $5 per year to $6.49, which equals the lowest reseller rate available from its wholesale provider, OpenSRS.

    But others are willing to sell domains below cost as a marketing strategy. The newest is MyValueHost, a new business unit of HostMysite.com, which has begun selling domain names for $4 a year.

    (more...)

    Posted by Rich Miller on 8th January, 2004 in Hosting Share

  3. Jump in Phishing Attacks in December

    "Phishing" attacks surged dramatically in the runup to Christmas, with more than 60 million fraudulent email messages sent out over two weeks in mid December, according to data from an industry group.

    The Anti-Phishing Working Group identified more than 90 unique email fraud and phishing attacks in November and December, as scammers sought to capitalize on the increased online shopping activity during the holiday season. Numerous campaigns employed a widely publicised bug in Internet Explorer that allows fraudsters to construct more convincing urls.

    (more...)

    Posted by Rich Miller on 7th January, 2004 in Security Share

  4. Go Daddy, The Planet Continue Strong Growth

    Go Daddy continued its dynamic growth in December, adding 52K hostnames, more than twice as many as the next-best performer, The Planet. The two providers drew from different customer bases, with Go Daddy's gains driven by new domain signups (adding 86K new hostnames while 33K expired) while the The Planet drew business away from other hosting companies. The Planet had a net gain of 14.6K hostnames from competitors, with substantial head-to-head gains against AT&T (6.5K hostnames), EV1Servers (866), BurstNet (540) and NetAccess (460).

    Top Hosting Providers By Growth, Nov 03 to Dec 03
    Hosting Company Nov 03 Dec 03 Growth %
    Growth    		 Primary
    Region
    GoDaddy Inc 1,583,263 1,635,680 52,417 3.3% America
    The Planet 105,355 124,562 19,207 18.2% America
    Ethernext.com 34,611 49,094 14,483 41.8% America
    Cable & Wireless 756,403 767,600 11,197 1.5% America
    ServInt Corp. 42,907 53,681 10,774 25.1% America
    MCI 677,074 686,877 9,803 1.4% America
    1&1 Internet AG 3,497,569 3,505,880 8,311 0.2% Europe
    Level 3 124,488 132,772 8,284 6.7% America
    Datapipe 114,605 122,805 8,200 7.2% America

    (more...)

    Posted by Rich Miller on 5th January, 2004 in Hosting Share

  5. INetU, Cable and Wireless most reliable hosting company sites during December

    Ranking by Failed Requests and Connection time,
    December 1st - 31st 2003

    hosting_prov_nov2003.png

    During December both the INetU and Cable & Wireless sites were faultless with no failed requests at all from any of our five measurement points.

    INetU's site has been consistently highly ranked throughout Q4 2003, and has now been in the top three for the last three months running. As neither INetU or Cable and Wireless had any failed requests, INetU is ranked above Cable & Wireless because the average connection time from our performance measurment points to the INetU site was faster.

    Cable and Wireless, located in Swindon is the hosting company site that is geographically closest to Netcraft, but it does not enjoy any special advantage because of this; there is only one performance collection point in the UK, which is in London.

    Sites running on BSD operating systems occupied four out of the first seven places.

    (more...)

    Posted by Mike Prettejohn on 1st January, 2004 in Performance Share

  6. January 2004 Web Server Survey

    In the January 2004 survey we received responses from 46,067,743 sites.

    Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - January 2004

    Graph of market share for top servers across all domains, August 1995 - January 2004

    Top Developers
    Developer December 2003Percent January 2004Percent Change
    Apache3100569067.433104092267.38-0.05
    Microsoft959657120.87967597921.000.13
    SunONE15303723.3315038553.26-0.07
    Zeus7497911.637520531.630.00

    (more...)

    Posted by Netcraft on 1st January, 2004 in Web Server Survey Share

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