Category Archives: Warnings

It happens all the time: you click on a link and the website that comes up is not what you expected. If you’re lucky, the page is simply gone, but the site may look oddly similar and contain links for the subject you’re interested in, or it may be a trap bristling with malware and spam. In any case, you probably shrug and move on, pausing briefly to delete the bookmark if there is one, but you likely don’t spend much time wondering what happened. What happened is that the website owner quit. Maybe she or he died, or their lives and interests changed, or the company went broke. Possibly the owner just forgot to renew the domain registration. Whatever the cause, abandoned domains rarely just die quietly forgotten any more. Usually they are snapped up even if they are not high-traffic, popular sites, often by a domain registrar hoping to cash in on, but increasingly by people with worse intentions in mind. Not long ago, it was not uncommon for websites of churches, schools and government institutions that had lapsed to be grabbed up by Web porn purveyors. They may have done it more for the shock value rather than to make money, but in more recent times even more sinister characters have been doing much the same. Nowadays, an abandoned website may present an irresistible temptation to hackers and spammers to walk in and take over. However, unlike … Continue reading →