Screwing Candidates Only a Mouse-Click Away: Phishing and Other Geeky Tricks
Fri Nov 23, 2007 at 10:36:44 AM PDT
First, I am going to state up-front, right now, that I am not advocating any overall "Conspiracy Theories" against any candidate. I'm simply posting this stuff, and letting it speak for itself. I will tell you, however, that what I am going to talk about is going to have its meta-moments, so I will try very hard to convey this information in a way that won't leave the average kossack's eyes glazing over.
That said, I found the following interesting bits quite by accident, and thought it was definitely worth sharing. This could affect ANY of our candidates. The crux of the biscuit is just a hop over the fold away...
So I'm searching the 'Net this morning, and just happen to be actually using the "URL address line" of my web browser, something I don't do very often (I'm usually a search-engine kinda girl). Oddly enough, I hadn't yet bookmarked Dennis Kucinich's 2008 candidate page, and I knew it was something with a 4 in it.
Now, if you know anything at all about the Internet, you know that sometimes you can type in a partial address (URL) in your browser address line, hit 'enter', and more often than not, be 'redirected' to the web page you're actually looking for. Wikipedia defines "redirecting" very nicely:
URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.
So--I'm feeling lazy, and I also know that my browser has an 'auto-archive' feature (meaning if I get the first part of the site name typed in correctly, my browser will show me site names with the exact text I've used, that I have surfed in the past). So first, I typed in:
http://www.kucinich4president.com
This took me to a "free starter page provided by GoDaddy.com" which said "This Domain Name is For Sale"! Oops--OK, I've seen that page before, and that's also why it popped up in my 'previous addresses line'. But...that's not the site I'm looking for.
So then, I typed in:
http://www.kucinich4
Nada. This one got me nothing but the dreaded "Page Not Found" error.
So then, I type in this:
http://www.kucinich.com
Ooofah! Not only did I get a hit, I got a re-direct, to a page called Recall Dennis.com. And who is responsible for this page? Oh, my stars and bars, there's a disclaimer posted, in teeny-tiny print on that page, which says:
Paid for by the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.
Well! How utterly fascinating! So I started typing in other candidate names in my URL address line, to see what would happen (all examples follow the http_colon_slashes_www_dot intro)
Clinton? For clinton.com, a site came up called The Clinton Group--no surprise here, Clinton isn't exactly an uncommon surname. For hillary.com, a software company page comes up. HillaryClinton.com took me right to her candidate site.
Edwards? Edwards.com will get you to a page by Edwards LifeSciences. Type in johnedwards.com, however, and you'll go right to JRE's candidate site.
Obama? Now, this was interesting--typing obama.com takes me right to...some sort of page with Chinese writing all over it. Heh. But if I type barackobama.com, I go right to Obama's candidate site.
Dodd? Well, for this candidate, you have to type in chrisdodd.com--if you type in christopherdodd.com, you get a Christopherdodd.com is Coming Soon, by Register.com--and, like many pages of this nature, also features a bunch of links that the searcher might find to be useful. Here, I found the "Political Discussion" link to be relevant, though, knowing what I know about blind links from meta searches, I'll be damned if I'm going to click on any of them!
Well, that was enough for me. Off I went to WHOIS, to glean more info on recallkucinich.com. This site is, in fact, registered by the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County. But the site itself is hosted by...wait for it...GoDaddy.com!
Now, is there some sort of weird connection there? I doubted it, because GoDaddy.com is huge, and hosts a lot of websites. But, now my curiosity is running full-tilt, so I go to Yahoo and I type in "GoDaddy.com and Presidential Candidates". From there, I found a couple of really fascinating links, including one to Ebay. Dig this, willya?
You are bidding on nineteen presidential election domain names for 2008 and other years. You are buying the domain names only, websites are not included. The domain names have registration through at 6/30/2008. These names would be great for fundraising organizations, media outlets, or candidates. There are no implied financial gaurantees with the purchase of these domain names. Thanks for bidding and good luck. Buyer must have godaddy.com account for transfer of names. The names are as follows:
The list of names runs through 2020. Yep, it does. Bidding is over on this item, but for fuck's sake, what IS this about? Is GoDaddy just in the website business, or is there something else afoot?
Even scarier, from PC World, is an article titled Presidential Candidates Face Phishing Threat:
The Web operations for 2008's U.S. presidential candidates are vulnerable to phishing attacks, security researcher says..."The threat that poses the most danger now is what has posed the most danger in the past," said Oliver Friedrichs, the director of Symantec Corp.'s security response team and a writer on electoral cybercrime. "Phishing is the most significant problem now, and it has the potential to disrupt campaigns or even competing campaigns."
Not only are candidates' campaign Web sites prime targets for phishers -- the criminals could create bogus sites posing as the real deal to harvest contributors' credit card and bank account numbers -- but they could be victimized by radical followers of their opponent. "A phishing site could impersonate [the site of] one candidate, say Hillary Clinton, but actually submit the donation to another candidate, Rudy Giuliani, for example," said Friedrichs. "It might be very unlikely that a campaign would do something like this, but it could be launched by individuals who already consider themselves criminals, or by radicalized voters....Even though the dollar amounts of such a "steal-from-Hillary-to-pay-Rudy" attack might be small, Friedrichs thinks there would be substantial fallout. "The diversion of donations like that has the potential to undermine the confidence in the online donation concept," he said."
Holy crap! What if I donated to Dennis Kucinich, but my money actually went to the Republican Party of Cuyahoga County? I did get a nice email thank you from Dennis and Elizabeth, along with the notation on my bank statement, which shows my donation entry and a phone number that goes to...his campaign HQ. Right? Well, not exactly: the phone number on my bank statement reverse lookups to Donald McTigue. McTigue is Kucinich's campaign treasurer, so I would like to assume that means my donation went to the right candidate.
There are a couple of lessons here, fellow bloggers. The first one is, I would implore you to check your bank statements, and if you've made any any online campaign donations, make sure it actually went to the candidate you wanted it to go to.
The second, regarding "redirecting URL's", I would like to think, at least where Dennis Kucinich is concerned, that the "redirection" to recallkucinich.com on a URL that isn't his current candidate site can happen because maybe his official campaign site's webmasters don't know enough about meta tags and redirection capabilities on whatever server they're using. Given that GoDaddy.com kept popping up in my research, however, it really makes me wonder.
If nothing else, this simple accident also proved to me, once again, that a lot of dirty tricks can be tied back to the sub-genus of homo sapiens known as the American Republican Party.
I will probably look more into the GoDaddy angle--it may or may not be worth pursuing, since anyone can buy a domain name--I just found that interesting. PLEASE! Fellow Kossacks, be careful where you click out here!
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