Ming-Na Wen’s Walk of Fame Ceremony on 30th May, 2023
Never in my wildest geek dream would I have thought that May would have started with Carrie Fisher, the late great Carrie Fisher, getting her star and me ending it. And then having Mark Hamill saying “Welcome to the Neighborhood!”
was in the car with my friend when I saw the car we passed had the license plate “SADNESS” and I went oh wait we gotta slow down so I can get a pic, but every time we went slower the other car also slowed down. so I looked behind us to see what was going on and the passenger also had their phone up and wheezing the same way I was, and that’s when I remembered my friend’s license plate is “LOSSJPG”
you think I would do that? just go on the internet and tell lies?
On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) – these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.
Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.
Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: “.zip” and “.mov”.
ALT
This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it’s in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.
What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.
Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
This is what we’re seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.
What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you’re on, don’t enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.
I’m seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company’s internet, and that’s probably wise.