Phishing, slamming and other fraudulent e-mails: Stay alert during the end-of-year holidays!

Phishing, slamming and other fraudulent e-mails: Stay alert during the end-of-year holidays!

The end-of-year holidays often announce the upsurge of fraudulent mass e-mails campaigns. Indeed, cybercriminals take advantage of this period, when vigilance can be particularly low, to launch phishing e-mails.

What are phishing and slamming?

Phishing is used by cybercriminals to obtain personal information in order to commit an identity theft.

In the world of phishing, slamming is a well-known variant that consists in encouraging domain names holders to renew their annuity with another registrar, by arguing the emergency and criticality of the concerned name’s loss. Concretely, this is an e-mail pushing its recipient to contract an unsolicited service and to proceed to the payment of this latter without delay.

Thus, the slamming may take the form of a fraudulent renewal invoice, usually associated with intimidating terms like “Expiration notice”. Under the pressure of such e-mail, generally well built, it happens that the recipient then proceeds to the payment and finds himself debited with an important amount for the so-called renewal.

In the same way, the slamming e-mail may also indicate that a “customer” of the sender, posing as a fake registrar, intends to register domain names identical or similar to your brand. Then the fraudster proposes to register them for you in order to protect you from these troublesome registrations, of course, in exchange for an urgent payment.

Another kind of attack, the suspicious e-mail attachment!

Be careful of fraudulent e-mails with infectious attachments: a single entry point is enough to destroy a network!

The aim of a trap and thus malicious attachment is to pose as a legitimate file (PDF, Word document, JPG image…), while hosting and hiding a malicious code: this is what we generally call Trojans.

Some simple rules to protect against them

  • Always stay alert when someone asks you your personal data;
  • Do not ever open an attachment from an unknown sender, or from one who is not entirely trustworthy;
  • Check the links by hovering the cursor over them (without clicking) to ensure that they link to trustworthy websites;
  • Never reply under the pressure of this kind of solicitation and of course do not proceed to any payment;
  • If there is any doubt, do not reply to the e-mail and contact the sender through another method who will confirm whether it really is a fraud attempt or not.

To remind you of this more often, you can find a wallpaper to download on the Nameshield website:

New document : 5 minutes to understand monitoring solutions

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Monitoring solutions - Nameshield

A domain name is not static, it evolves. It can be inactive, associated to a website, to a messaging service. The website can be operated, deactivated or its content can change. So many constant modifications that require a particular follow-up in the form of monitoring of domain names that may infringe your brand.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, the different monitoring solutions that provide you with information to protect your domain names and brands from possible infringements.

New document : 5 minutes to understand the URS procedure

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Nameshield

The URS (Uniform Rapid Suspension System) procedure is the latest domain name dispute resolution procedure implemented by ICANN for new extensions.

This procedure allows to sanction obvious and indisputable infringements of a trademark right resulting from the registration by third parties of identical or similar domain names regarding the new extensions.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document in which cases the URS procedure applies and what are the rules and conditions to respect.

New document: 5 minutes to understand the SYRELI procedure

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - SYRELI procedure - Nameshield

Placed under the aegis of AFNIC (French Association for Internet Naming in Cooperation), the SYRELI procedure allows to sanction obvious and indisputable infringements of a trademarks right resulting from the registration by third parties of identical or similar domain names.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on Nameshield’s website, in which cases the SYRELI procedure applies and what are the rules and conditions to respect.

New document: 5 minutes to understand UDRP procedure

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - UDRP procedure - Nameshield

Established on ICANN’s proposal, the UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy) extra-judicial procedure allows to sanction obvious and indisputable infringements of a trademark right resulting from the registration of identical or similar domain names by third parties, a practice commonly referred as “cybersquatting “.


UDRP applies not only to generic extensions (gTLDs) in .aero, .biz, .com, .coop, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .net, .org, .pro, .travel and new extensions (new gTLDs), but also to country code extensions (ccTLDs) of which the registry has accepted the UDRP principles.

New document available on the Nameshield’s website: “5 minutes to understand – Abusive domain names registrations

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Nameshield

The digital world is in perpetual evolution and every days, new domain names are registered around the world.

Among these new registrations, some can potentially affect your notoriety, your activity, and your results. Fraudsters, through these abusive domain names registrations, seek to benefit from your notoriety as quickly as possible.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, the different practices of abusive domain names registrations that can affect your brand and the actions to take depending on the infringement caused to the brand.

New document available on the Nameshield’s website: “5 minutes to understand – Domain names: which procedure?

5 minutes to understand - Domain names - Procedure - Nameshield

Names’ holders must protect their brands and domain names against fraud and abuse just as they would protect any other valuable asset. The infringement of your domain name weakens the strength of your brand.

If, despite defensive registrations, which are a first line of defense, you find out that a third party has registered a disputed domain name, procedures exist to stop the infringement of your trademark and stop the damage.

Find in this “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, these different dispute resolution procedures related to domain names.

Booking.com, a generic term turning into a brand?

Booking.com - domain name
Image source: Julius_Silver via Pixabay

A trademark must be “distinctive”, which is why no one can register a generic term as a trademark.

However, a decision of the US Supreme Court on June 30, 2020 allows Booking.com to register its domain name as a trademark.

If for USPTO (U.S Patent and Trademark Office), “booking” is a generic term, and adding the .COM would amount to adding “Company” to a name, thus arguing that booking.com cannot be registered as a trademark, the Court decided otherwise.

Indeed, it considered that “.COM” could not be compared to “company” since the essential criterion would be the identification of consumers.

In particular, the online travel company presented consumers surveys indicating that 75% of consumers thought Booking.com was a brand.

Of course, this first argument, easily challenged by Judge Breyer, was not the one that hit the nail on the head in the final decision. Since a domain name can only belong to one holder, the risks of confusion that must be avoided by trademarks could not arise here, since no one else can use the name Booking.com.

Despite the registration of the booking.com trademark, the company will not be able to use it as a trademark right in disputes that could oppose it to other companies using the generic term “booking” in their trademark.

To read the full decision, click here.

Municipal elections 2020: buzyn2020.fr and buzyn2020.paris domain names redirect towards Anne Hidalgo’s campaign

Municipal elections 2020: buzyn2020.fr and buzyn2020.paris domain names redirect towards Anne Hidalgo’s campaign
Image source: Sadnos via Pixabay

Following the announcement on Sunday February 16, of Agnès Buzyn’s candidacy to Paris municipal elections, several political journalists discovered on Monday that the domain name buzyn2020.fr was registered but redirected towards “Paris en commun”, the campaign website of another candidate, Anne Hidalgo.

Several other names were registered on Sunday night, also redirecting towards Paris en commun’s homepage like buzyn2020.paris, agnesbuzyn2020.fr and agnesbuzyn2020.com.

If several of these names were anonymously registered, two of them were registered by the association “Montreuil en Commun”, a group of “four municipal councilors” who claims to be “without any political label” and explains to Numerama the fact that these names were available “indicates the improvisation of her candidacy and LREM’s lightness regarding a serious matter such as a candidacy to run for Paris’ mayor”.

Raising awareness to cybersquatting risks

The LREM candidate will not be able to use the domain name buzyn2020.com either, which was registered on Monday by Crisalyde, a risk and crisis management consulting company.

I took the opportunity to raise awareness. It’s my job, I saw a risk and I took advantage of it”, explains Selim Miled, Crisalyde’s CEO, to the Parisien.

Cybersquatting is a practice that consists in taking a domain name by registering it, using or mentioning a trademark, a business name, a patronym or any name on which the applicant has any right, in order to make material or moral profit from its current or future notoriety.

Thus, Crisalyde registered 6 domain names: buzyn.paris, agnesbuzyn2020.paris, buzynpourparis.com, buzynpourparis.fr, buzyn2020.info and buzyn2020.com. “As soon as Agnès Buzyn’s team contacts me, I will give them the domain name at the purchased price, with a friendly advice” adds Selim Miled.

What strategy to adopt against cybersquatting?

Agnès Buzyn’s team will have to contact the persons who registered these names, who may decide to graciously give them back or resell them at prices they will have set.

However, legal actions exist aiming to retrieve a cybersquatted domain name, like the UDRP procedure (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy). This procedure will allow to suppress or transfer the domain name.

And lastly, in order to prevent any cybersquatting risk, it is recommended to implement a domain names registration monitoring to be immediately alerted of any new domain names registration that can potentially infringe your notoriety or your business.

For more information on our online brand protection expertise and domain names recovery procedures, don’t hesitate to contact a Nameshield consultant.

Does the GDPR negatively affect enforcement efforts?

Does the GDPR negatively affect enforcement efforts?
Image source: mohamed_hassan via Pixabay

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has without a doubt a negative impact on the enforcement efforts, according to the participants at the INTA 2019 annual meeting (International Trademark Association) in Boston.

Margaret Lia Milam, domain name strategy and management lead at Facebook warned that the platform’s scale makes it a “huge target for bad actors”.

Milam stated that because the site is working at such a scale, it cannot turn to lawyers for the “thousands” of requests it receives.

Statton Hammock of MarkMonitor said that MarkMonitor had suffered a loss of efficiency of 12% due to the GDPR. His team has “historically used WHOIS to protect IP rights” but because of the GDPR, all the data they have cached “become less and less useful with each passing day”.

Alex Deacon, founder of Cole Valley Consulting, echoed Milam and Hammock’s comments warning that the Spamhaus Project, an international organization aiming to track emails spammers, is struggling to manage its blacklist because of the GDPR.