With tropical storm Ernesto now blowing off the coast of Florida, Internet security experts are warning that fraudsters may
be hard at work claiming Ernesto-related Web site domains.
On Tuesday, 18 domains related to the storm became live, said Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute.
They include such names as Ernestoinsurance.com, Ernestomoney.com and Ernestodamage.com. Ullrich's Web posting on this topic
can be found here.
Scammers began cashing in on natural disasters in a widespread way following the December 2004 earthquake and Tsunamis that
killed hundreds of thousands in southeast Asia, Ullrich said.
Last year there were reports of large-scale fraud in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and parts of
the U.S. Gulf Coast. In September, the FBI warned that more than half of the Hurricane Katrina aid sites that it had reviewed
were registered to people outside of the United States and likely to be fraudulent.
SANS saw about 1,000 Katrina-related domains registered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Ullrich said. The majority of these
domains were set up for what he called "domain parking," an attempt to make money by placing ads on a Web site that surfers
seem likely to stumble upon.
Ernestoinsurance.com, for example was registered by Julian Luby a graduate student in Portland, Ore., who said he registered
between 30 and 50 Ernesto-related domains, beginning Sunday. Luby registered the domains for the dual purposes of providing
information on the storm and raising money for a group of social networking sites he is developing.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
