Millions of indexed blogspot.in URLs are at risk of being abused for malicious purposes after Google let the domain expire, and it was purchased and put up for sale by another company.
Google allowed their blogspot.in domain expire in early June 2020, and it has been purchased by another company that is selling it for $6,000.
In 2012, Google implemented a new feature that redirects Blogspot sites to country-specific URLs that match their geolocation and comply with content take-down requests more quickly.
One of the domains that were used by Blogspot is blogspot.in, whose registration Google lets lapse in early June 2020.
This lapse in registration caused 4.4 million URLs in the Google search results to become broken as the domain was no longer responding to requests.
For example, if someone in India accessed a blogspot.in URL, the site would not load with the error message "blogspot.in's server IP address could not be found."
Likewise, the blogspot.in permalinks shared by users on social media are also broken as Google has lost control of the domain name.
While the blogspot.in profiles appear to have been moved to Blogger.com, these URLs are still live in the Google search results and do not redirect users to the new blogs.
After learning about this on June 3rd, 2020, from Gulshan Kumar, BleepingComputer contacted Google but never received a response.
The domain is ripe for abuse
Today it was discovered that a shared hosting provider named domainming.com, based out of India, purchased the domain on June 24th, 2020, after it became inactive.
Domain Name: blogspot.in
Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
Domain Status: inactive http://www.icann.org/epp#inactive
It's not yet clear whether the purchaser contacted Google to make arrangements to transfer back the domain, but the Blogspot.in is now for sale on the Sedo domain marketplace for $5,999.
This price is a small amount to gain control of millions of URLs that are listed in Google search and posted on social platforms and forums.
With that many URLs, a threat actor could purchase the domain and use it to spread scams, malware, or perform blackhat SEO.
Due to the risks associated with letting a highly active domain expire, it is strange that Google allowed this to happen considering how cheap it would be to have kept it registered even if not being used.
We have reached out to Google again, and the new domain owner for comment but have not heard back yet.
Comments
domainerin - 3 years ago
The registrar "domainming"(domainming.com) of .in domains, is the biggest abuser of nixi policies. NIXI specifically says that registrars themselves cannot participate in dropcatching and selling, but the owner of domainming Mr. Salim, goes on with his business unperturbed. I am sure like how the Indian registrar mitsu was banned by NIXI for violation of policies, the same way I am certain that law will catch up with domainming.