Enom Spear Phishing Email Received

Andrew Allemann wrote about a phishing email he received purporting to by from Dynadot, and I received a very similar email purporting to be from Enom. The email was caught by Gmail in the spam/junk filter, so it looks like some mail providers have been catching on to these phishing attempt.

By my own observations, it seems that domain registrar phishing attempts are on the rise. This particular attack looks like it is more along the lines of a spear phishing attempt since it mentioned a specific domain name that is owned by my company rather than being randomly sent.

When a hacker is able to obtain account login information due to a successful phishing attempt, they can easily steal domain names from the account. While most seasoned domain investors would not fall prey to this, I would imagine there are people who own just a few domain names that might.

The best thing to do to secure domain registrar accounts, in my opinion, is to have two factor authentication enabled. Many registrars offer it, and it’s very important to set up.

I have published the email below so you can see what it looks like:

5 Reasons Why I Keep My Sales Private

The vast majority of my domain name sales are private, both the names and sales prices. I don’t share most of them on my corporate website, and I don’t blog about them. I don’t even really discuss them with friends and colleagues either.

I understand that people have different motivations for reporting sale prices. Some people want to share their sales publicly so that others can see that domain names are selling for “real” money. Some people have similar domain names in their portfolios, so a reported sale helps boost the value (and purchase interest) in their other domain names. Other people may simply wish to show that they are moving inventory and closing deals.

There are several reasons why I keep my sales private, and I thought I would share some of the reasons. Ultimately, if it hurts my business or otherwise does not help my business, I am not going to share private information.  Listed below are 5 reasons why I don’t share my domain name sales publicly:

Announcing China Boot Camp Videos

China Boot Camp is Allegravita’s latest masterclass series for non-Chinese domain registries, registrars and domain name investors seeking a fast, effective and profitable entry to China and Chinese-speaking markets.

As you’d be aware, we created, wrote and delivered the Chinese domaining masterclasses at Namescon 2015 on behalf of our client at the time, TLD Registry. That series of masterclasses was attended by almost 400 domainers and industry pros during Namescon, and we got such positive feedback on our work explaining Chinese IDNs and the history and present of Chinese domaining.

Upon reflecting on how we could better that series of masterclasses, we felt that it

We Are Not “Legends”

In Giuseppe Graziano’s newsletter earlier this week, he referred to a few of us domain industry bloggers who were up for an award as “legends.” I know Giuseppe meant this to be complementary, but I cringed when I read it. Since a newsletter isn’t something I can comment on, I thought I would take a moment to write about it here, especially in light of other industry discussions.

I am very fortunate to be in a position where I can write a blog that earns advertising revenue while running my business. It’s enjoyable to be able to communicate with people from around the world in the domain name space. I have learned a lot about investing in domain names, and I have been able to grow my business.

For whatever  reason, some people put

ABC Announces Freeform; Acquires Freeform.com

In an article published on October 6, ABC announced a name change for ABC Family. According to the article, “ABC Family changes its name to Freeform in January 2016! The network’s new name reflects our ongoing priority to super-serve Becomers, fans on that epic adventure of becoming an adult—from first kiss to first kid!

When I read about the rebranding, I visited Freeform.com to see if ABC was using the exact match .com domain name. Yes, Freeform.com currently forwards to ABCFamily.Go.com, the ABC Family website. A current Whois lookup confirms that Freeform.com is registered to ABC, Inc.

Interestingly, ABC.com Inc. was not listed as the

Las Cruces CVB Rebrands as “Visit Las Cruces”

I read an article on KRWG.org, the local PBS affiliate in Southern  New Mexico and Far West Texas, and I thought I would share it with you. According to the article, “The Las Cruces Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) has announced that it will be transitioning its name and logo to Visit Las Cruces.”

It appears that the organization was able to acquire the VisitLasCruces.com domain name earlier this year. I do not see an archived sales record for this domain name on NameBio, so my guess is that it was a private deal that won’t be reported. I am going to reach out to the director of the CVB to see if he will share the price they paid since that interests me. I am both a buyer and seller of Visit(geography) domain names, and having this information is helpful when I am buying or selling a similar domain name.

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