What’s a slamming?

The slam­ming is a well-known vari­ant of phish­ing in the domain names’ world. It con­sists in encour­ag­ing domain names own­ers to renew their annu­ity with anoth­er reg­is­trar, by argu­ing the emer­gency and crit­i­cal­i­ty of the con­cerned name’s loss.

There are two kinds of slam­ming:

• The fake renew­al invoice: this prac­tice con­sists in send­ing a domain name’s expi­ra­tion noti­fi­ca­tion, which is in real­i­ty, a domain name trans­fer request towards anoth­er provider.

If the domain name’s own­er doesn’t check and answers pos­i­tive­ly to this noti­fi­ca­tion, their domain name will be trans­ferred to a new provider.

• The reg­is­tra­tion black­mail: a com­pa­ny receives a registrar’s mail inform­ing that a domain name con­cern­ing them, or a sim­i­lar domain name, is about to be reg­is­tered by a third par­ty. Then the reg­is­trar pro­pos­es them the pri­or­i­ty for imme­di­ate reg­is­tra­tion of this name, in exchange of a cost in gen­er­al, high­er than the aver­age of course. In most cas­es, this is a scam!

How to protect against slamming?

• Be vig­i­lant;
• Check the links by hov­er­ing the cur­sor over them (with­out click­ing) to ensure that they link to trust­wor­thy web­sites;
• Do not reply under the pres­sure of this kind of solic­i­ta­tion and do not pro­ceed to any pay­ment;
• If there is any doubt, con­tact the sender through anoth­er method, they will con­firm if it real­ly is a fraud attempt or not.

You can find on the blog a detailed arti­cle about slam­ming.