Scammers use spam at first.
What appears to be an email from the Internet’s governing body, ICANN, is a scamming attempt at “pinging” millions of email addresses.
The email originates from icannvalidation@icannvalidation.org and is titled “Test.”
The body of the message contains the following:
Please do not respond to this email. This email is part of a survey by
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) related
to contact information in the WHOIS records of domain names. No action
is required. For more information please visit, whois.icann.org.Thank you,
WHOIS Accuracy Reporting System Project
Naturally, the domain icannvalidation.org is not related to ICANN.
According to DomainTools, both icannvalidation.org and icannvalidation.com were registered with Google domains on 8/7/2015.
The choice of Google as the registrar is an apparent attempt at delivering a false indication of authority to the scamming emails.
This is typically the first step by phishing scammers, who then up their game by attaching viruses, trojans or phishing emails in an attempt to hijack domain credentials to accounts.
