Could the LGBTQ Community Be a Target of Internet Threat Actors?

This article has been indexed from CircleID: Cybercrime

Pride month is celebrated worldwide. While it’s meant to be a time of celebration for members of the LGBTQ community and their families and supporters, its popularity has also made it a possible target of cyber threats. In this post, we look at potentially dangerous Internet properties that have been registered both recently and over the years.

Pride Month-Related Domains and Subdomains

A recent asset discovery search for domains and subdomains containing the string “pride month” provided a list of:

A bulk WHOIS lookup for these revealed that only two of the domains were publicly attributable (i.e., their registrants’ names appeared on their WHOIS records). That amounts to only 3% of the total number of domains and subdomains. In addition, four of the domains were newly registered.

Based on screenshot lookups, only 13 of the domains and subdomains resolved to live websites (excluding those that are parked and currently up for sale). One of these (i.e., pridemonth[.]club), however, could be considered suspicious as instead of supporting the LGBTQ community, it seems to be a site for those who do not support it.

Fortunately for those who may be looking for reputable Pride Month-related websites, none of the domains and subdomains we subjected to Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) malware database checks were flagged as “malicious.”

LGBTQ-Themed Domains and Subdomains

A domains and subdomains discovery search for domains and subdomains containing the string “lgbtq” provided a list of:

As the numbers show, there are far more websites whose names contain “lgbtq” compared with “pride month.”

A bulk WHOIS lookup for these revealed that only 308 (4%) had publicly identifiable registrants based on the email addresses in their WHOIS records. In addition, 22 of these were registered this year.

Read the original article: Could the LGBTQ Community Be a Target of Internet Threat Actors?