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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

CrowdStrike/CSC has owned at least clownstrike.com and clownstrike.net since 2012, but they weren't on the ball with those new TLDs it seems.

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This is true [0]! But even more surprisingly clownstrike.com redirects to crowdstrike.com. I am surprised why they may have thought this is a good idea, but it means that we can actually use clownstrike.com instead to reference it in the web.

[0] https://www.whois.com/whois/clownstrike.com

It's fairly par for the course, for big business.

For example: https://www.microsoft.sucks/en-au/microsoft-365

I assume they intend to redirect misspells, and they unintentionally include domains making fun of them, but it is still funny and stupid they do it.

I get it, staying on the ball in fast-changing dynamic environments can be tough, good thing they don't run an EDR

Their TLD scraper created a file of nothing but zeroes, so the registration script crashed and went into a bootloop trying to read it.

I worked at company_name when the .xxx top level domain became available, and my boss was sure that we should buy company_name.xxx. I talked them out of it. Luckily no one has maliciously registered company_name.xxx all these years later. I guess it could happen any day now.

Does rule 34 apply to corporations?

It’s quite surprising to me that they thought to do that, although maybe I’m just naive.

I wonder what other parody names and altered versions they own…

CSCs whole deal is securing domain names for huge brands, they probably have people whose job involves thinking of derogatory domains like that so they can grab them pre-emptively. The people behind the .sucks TLD turned that into an incredible grift, they charge an exorbitant amount (about $300 a year) because they know every big brand will buy brand.sucks no matter what.

I worked for a company where MarkMonitor proactively registered domains for us which were likely typos of our brand (e.g. example.com -> examlpe.com, exmaple.com, etc), and would hunt down registrations of new domains which appeared likely to be phishing sites. They didn't catch everything, but they were pretty good.

.sucks TLD sounds like genious idea made real.

http://microsoft.sucks redirect to Microsoft.com and they pay for it.

.EXPOSED operates on the same premise. And a lot of these gTLDs are run by groups of the same shady guys based out of Cyprus and Hong Kong.

I mean, there's now what, 2,000 TLDs and growing? I'm not sure it's going to be practical to own every likely parody domain at every TLD.

A big company can afford it. Drop in the bucket.

Ah, what?! So, there was already a running joke about CrowdStrike being a clown one? Otherwise, why buy it and redirect to it? What about DoubtStrike?

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