In a time long ago, in a country far down under...The Lost Agency was started with an idea that things shouldn’t really be so hard to find! We built a brand around what we had, why start a company if you don’t practice what you preach from the start.

We focused on a catchy name that had all the domains available to protect our brand and worked from there. There was no point in having a company website that already had a number of competitors with similar domains or having to pay thousands to buy an existing website, we built our brand from the ground up.

We based the company about 5 main areas that we realised would prove the most useful to business and the least understood. So if you are interested in helping your business using online tools, and want honest feedback and useful advice contact us today!

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Domain Scams

Domain Scams

You might see a number of inconsistent domains for companies or sites that don't seem to be what you intended to find. It could be a domain hack, which is usually a marketing trick, it could be a redirection tool such as wildcard DNS or could be a scam like Fast Flux.

 

Wildcard DNS
A wildcard DNS record is a record in a DNS zone that will match all requests for non-existent domain names, i.e. domain names for which there are no records at all and a “Address not found” or "server not found" message. Money is generated from Yahoo ads that are displayed and hopefully clicked.

The .cm registry in Cameroon has been accused of redirecting misspelled .com addresses to an ad-based search page http://agoga.com instead of returning an error page. Kevin Ham is the business man behind the deal but it appears that he doesn’t own many .cm domain names but has his deal with Cameroon government to redirect all *unregistered* domains to agoga.com. There are a number of generic domains that have also been registered by other individuals and redirect visitors to landing pages which are often present poorly constructed landing pages which arent usually filled with relevant material.

Cameroon redirection example: www.theredfoxjumpsoveraloginparisinsummer.com now try www.theredfoxjumpsoveraloginparisinsummer.cm

Top-level domains using a wildcard DNS record (May 2007) include .cm, .mp, .nu, .ph, .pw, .tk and .ws.

Example CM Scam Sites
disney.cm (Disney Related Text Ads linked to MeanWhile.com)
verizon.cm (redirects to Freewirelesscellphones.info displaying Ads)
google.cm (redirects to 837832716.net displaying multiple iframe websites)
microsoft.cm (Domain Reseller landing page)
yahoo.cm (redirects to geospecific yahoo site)
abc.cm (text ads linked to searchportal.information.com)
myspace.cm (redirects to 1000myspacelayouts.com displaying multiple iframe websites)

Fast flux
Fast flux is a DNS technique used by botnets to hide phishing & malware sites behind an ever-changing compromised hosts acting as proxies. It can be used to make malware networks more resistant to discovery and counter-measures. The Storm Worm is one of the recent malware variants to make use of this technique and is this technique is often linked to criminal organisations. Myspace has seen regular phishing attacks using this method.

If you think this is happening to your browser on a regular basis use software such as Norton Antivirus to run a scan or update your existing anti-virus software to make sure you are protected. Most new browsers versions such as FireFox 3 notify you if such strange techniques are being used without your notice.