ICANN phishing attempts target domain owners and, in recent cases, hackers target first time domain registration companies and persons with sophisticated scam attempts.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet, ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation.

Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent message designed to trick a human victim into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim’s infrastructure like ransomware.

Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages).

A new example of ICANN phisshing attempt comes from: emailverification.info

You can find the mail title: “Request for email address validation” as very catchy.

The description also tries to get victims to click on a link:

Dear registrant or prospective registrant,

due to the requirements under the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement we are required to confirm the validity of the email address provided for the domain name registration application or contact creation.

You will only have to do this once for each email address used.

Please click on the following link to confirm that you have received
this email and to validate your email address:

http://emailverification.info?trigger=MTU2NDM13NDY1OS433OTM3IzQyNjIzOD7U0OTAzMjM3Ng%3D%3D&[email protected]

If the above shown link should be broken please proceed to

http://emailverification.info

and enter your personal validation token into the form field:

trigger = MTU2NDM13NDY1OS433OTM3IzQyNjIzOD7U0OTAzMjM3Ng==

Please note that in case you do not validate your email address, we are required to suspend your domain name registration(s) using these contact details no later than:

Tuesday August 13. 2019 04:30:59 UTC

After the suspension date you can always re-activate your domain name(s) by confirming the address as described above.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you do not carry out this confirmation, the domain registration guidelines prescribe that the status of your domain (s) mentioned above is changed to “on hold”. In consequence your domain(s) can not be reached anymore.

Thank you very much for your cooperation!

Best regards,
Your ICANN Accredited Registrar

Our recommendation

Never click on links from untrusted email senders. Read carefully the email titles and description and don’t provide credentials or sensitive information to untrusted websites or companies/persons.

We recommend you to use Protectumus because it provides a Free Website Security Check scanner that also verifies if an IP, a web, desktop or mobile app is marked as a spammer. You can try for free the Spam Health Check.