Obsolete Bookmarks get redirected to malicious sites by DNS owners!
Hi Everyone!
I use Windows 10 and latest FF 75 64bit. I run 3 A/V software, a robust hosts file from mvps dot org, armed with a lot of browser security plugins/addons, strict high settings for both router and windows firewall, etc.
I have a unique problem. I have a lot of bookmarks, about 12000! Some of them are obsolete and a lot of them duplicates. I finally decided to clean them up yesterday, so I downloaded the following Bookmark Addons plus a few Windows EXE tools(Each of them accomplishes something that the others don't!):
Bookmark Dupes by Martin Väth, Bookmarks clean up by itwillnotbeasy, Bookmarks Organizer by Sören Hentzschel
Anyway, I rand the dedupe feature and then I ran the validators and now my bookmarks are reduced to 2000. I went through all the 2000 BM's manually to make sure the add-ons did their job. I caught a lot of obsolete BM's out of the 2000 that were specifically owned by hugedomains dot com and they were all redirected to shady malicious sites(I checked them all in virustotal dot com) and saved as a permanent BM in my FF! How can any tool rewrite/redirect my FF BM's? What tool did this, the 3 plugins/addons I used above or hugedomains? If latter, do I need to report hugedomains to authorities? A last question: When I ran the bookmark checkers to validate the 2000 sites, does that pee-off the site admins as their sites are pinged? I noticed some sites like Facebook, Linkedin, Monster, etc don't allow remote checking and bookmark checkers report such URLs as http 500. Thanks
Chosen solution
It is quite possible that the extension that you used to check the link updates the URL if the currently saved URL doesn't match with the URL it gets redirected to. If that is the case then it would be nice that some log is created to notify you of such an update. If you would open such a redirected bookmark that wasn't updated in a tab then you would see a gray star and not a highlighted star.
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It is quite common that companies buy a domain if this domain gets abandoned (discontinued) by its owner. Once they own this IP range the nothing stops them from keeping the original DNS records and link them to other domains. I see that in a lot of cases with older bookmarks that I haven't used for years. A bookmark or link checker can only test is there is still a DNS resolution for a link and may not going that far to flag links as suspicious when they redirect to another domain as it is quite possible that this is legitimate (Flash: Macromedia => Adobe; Hotmail => Outlook). There are lots of server redirects where website change organization and owner. You can only verify this by checking this out and possibly search internet.
Thanks cor-el. I understand that many sites(legit or illegit) have re-directors but the part I don't understand is how or who has access to modify my FF bookmarks urls? Is this a bug in FF when any website has access to modify my bookmark urls w/o an interactive message? Or is this a known behavior and Mozilla knows about it?
e.g. when I browsed to an obsolete site like www dot xyz dot com; hugedomains literally changed my FF bkmk to hugedomains dot com/{insert bunch url parameters here}=survey-smiles which is a malicious site still full of malware. I reported them but their isp, who is probably incahoot with them, dismissed me.
Thanks
Modified by Ken94105
Chosen Solution
It is quite possible that the extension that you used to check the link updates the URL if the currently saved URL doesn't match with the URL it gets redirected to. If that is the case then it would be nice that some log is created to notify you of such an update. If you would open such a redirected bookmark that wasn't updated in a tab then you would see a gray star and not a highlighted star.
Thank you cor-el for your reply and clearing that up for me :)