Finshake

Over the past couple days I’ve been reporting over on the Internet Storm Center about the number of domains that have been registered (either legitimately for good use, or for malicious use) concerning the Haitian Earthquake disaster.  Read the original article here.

Like I said in that article, we’re assuming that these domains are being registered for legitimate and helpful use, but we try and keep our eye out for the illegitimate ones, just in case someone wants to put some malware on a site, or try and trick you into giving up your credit card numbers or donating money via Paypal to a “cause” that never donates the money to Haiti on the backend.  We saw this with Hurricane Katrina, we saw it with the Tsunami disaster, and now, we are seeing it with the Haitian Earthquake.  (See the article here.)

But the number of registered domains is on the rise.  We saw 38 on Wednesday, 445 on Thursday, and today we saw 680.   (So, well over 1,000) It’s practically impossible to check these domains by hand, so we are working with a couple partners in the Internet Space to take a look at these domains with us to ensure that they are clean.

Please exercise caution when visiting these sites, and please, donate money for the cause.  But please be extra cautious about who you are donating money to.  You know you can donate to legitimate sites like the RedCross, but do you also know you can donate to these other organizations:

• CARE: http://www.care.org/
• International Red Cross:  http://www.icrc.org/
• Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders: http://doctorswithoutborders.org

(Thanks Kevin for those links)