[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitsquatting
[2] https://www.securitee.org/files/bitsquatting_www2013.pdf
The consensus seemed to be that it wasn't that impactful anymore (if it ever was).
According to Wikipedia, Akamai is one of Markmonitor's customers, so it is surprising that this wasn't already registered by them.
Seems odd MarkMonitor wouldn't prioritize that
It used to be easy to trawl through certificate transparency logs and find certificate mis-issuance on the .int TLD because there are very few organizations allowed to be registered in this zone legitimately.
Remember tpc.int?
Now you might speculate that it was kids playing or something, but based on the time(s) of the calls, the demographics of the island, etc. we always believed it was just some sort of phone malfunction.
On one serendipitous occasion the fault came from a school district I also support. The fault came from a contingency landline kept around in case the VoIP phone system lost digital PSTN connectivity. I was able to plug-in to the line w/ a butt set and hear clicky, buzzy, nightmarishly bad PSTN sounds thru it.
We turned it over to the ILEC and they "fixed" it. Given the number of "roadkill" splice pedestals I see in my area I feel pretty confident the ILEC isn't doing any maintenance of the copper cable plant at all. (It makes me pretty irritated, considering the favorable tax subsidies they received to build it.)
Yep. In a number of places the old ILEC's have publicly declared their intention to deprecate the old copper based PSTN. In other areas, they seem to be practicing a sort of "malicious neglect" and just letting it decay on the vine, to avoid spending money on maintenance.
https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/mysterious-death-davina-buff-...
https://www.southernfriedtruecrime.com/38-officer-davina-buf...
https://portcitydaily.com/local-news/2013/12/17/brunswick-da...
It's not unbelievable to me that water could get into one of these and "short out" one of these buttons.
FWIW, at one time (relative to here in the US at least) there were at least two different major "kinds" of payphones. COCOTS (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones)[1] and what I call (for lack of a better term) "telephone company payphones". The latter being owned and controlled by the local telco. Part of the difference is how signaling works. For a COCOT, it is the case that the line is a plain jane line, that you could - ahem cough theoretically cough - beige box onto and dial calls using DTMF or pulse dialing. For those phones, the "magic" that made it a "pay" phone was inside the phone itself. For the "telephone company payphones" the line was configured differently and tones were sent in-band over the line to tell the switch that the coins had been deposited. This is the idea behind the old "red box" notion of recording the coin tones and playing them back to get free calls.
So yeah, a COCOT line could almost certainly be subject to something like random shorts being interpreted as pulse dialing and could possibly call 911. For a telephone company payphone I'm less sure if those supported pulse dialing or not. The lack of coin tones shouldn't matter since calls to 911 are always free, but I'm not sure if the line was different in other ways as well, or not.
Which one the BHI phone was, I never knew. But this was in the late 90's and by then a lot of the old skool telephone company payphones had disappeared in favor of COCOT's so if I had to guess, I'd guess it was a COCOT.
Tried dialing 112 once just to see what would happen, and it immediately connected me to 911. Interesting conversation with the dispatcher when I told them that I had not, in fact, dialed 911.
Numbers like 000 are a different matter, there are scenarios in which they might not work even if you're in Australia (when you have a non-australian SIM or no SIM at all, for example).
For more about this, see e.g.
https://nickvsnetworking.com/tales-from-the-trenches-emergen...
I use an old thrift store flip phone to make 911 calls when I would prefer to stay anonymous. 911 can even call you back using the IMEI!
I.e., New York's original area code is 212, someone in CA, dialing "long distance" to New York needs to dial 9 1 212 xxx xxxx. One button off on the first "2" and they just made a call to 911.
Before that, on some systems you'd have to dial 9 to get outside, and then "911" again, so "9911".
On the other hand, this sort of misconfiguration would show up in any sort of good DNS checking tool. One of your registered nameservers doesn't resolve and/or one of your name servers doesn't return the same zone serial (likely) or actual response if you check a name.
In .is, they wouldn't let me register a domain unless I provided two known good nameservers, but .com isn't picky anymore.
So if you get the glue that says mastercard has 5 servers, and you already know 4 of them are good, probably send your query to one and don't even bother trying to find the address of the .ne server.
I'd be surprised if it bubbles up in logging unless all/ maybe most of the authoritative servers for a popular hostname/domain name are unresponsive.
In my (distant) family, there was a guy who married a woman whose name was the same as his sister's, and she changed her family name to his. They all lived together for a short while.
Letters addressed to his wife and his sister would have the exact same address and exact same name on them, with no way to distinguish who the letter was for.
One more edge case to add to the "falsehoods programmers believe about names" list.