A rare week (not to mention a month) passes by without news about companies that for some strange reason forgot to renew registration for their domain names. Another victim of the “epidemic of forgetfulness” is Dell, one of the largest manufacturers of computer equipment in the world. Famous journalist Brian Krebs posted on his blog that the incident took place in June this year when the registration of the domain DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com expired. The domain is used by the Dell Backup and Recovery Application (DBAR), which is pre-installed on almost all Dell computers and serves for backup and recovery of data if there are any technical problems.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t Dell itself that forgot to renew the registration but it’s partner SoftThinks. However, it hardly changes anything for the users. The domain without the owner was soon purchased by the German company TeamInternet.com, which is involved in typosquatting, according to Brian Krebs’ information. Typosquatting is registration of domain names that are similar in writing to well-known websites but are frequently used by criminals to redirect users to dodgy webpages. Moreover, some time after registrant’s change several users reported that when they tried to open DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com they received a notification from the browser that the domain is hosted on a server, which spreads malware.
Dell admitted that the domain wasn’t renewed on time and assured that the problem has been fixed and the domain’s transition to a third party didn’t affect users. Owners of Dell computers are left to believe that this statement is true and be consoled that they are not the only ones. Several days ago it was reported that IBM, another IT giant, forgot to renew domains of several of its cloud services.
