DNSFilter CEO Ken Carnesi using Monero FUD to promote his business
DNSFilter1’s CEO Ken Carnesi2 is spreading Monero FUD3 in an attempt to promote his own business.
He is targeting sites that have the terms XMR and Monero in their domain names:
Sites that include the term XMR (that Monero abbreviation used in both of the domains above) are blocked via security categories on our network 43.56% of the time.
The 1st and 3rd largest Monero mining pools, MineXMR4 and SupportXMR5, were labeled highly suspicious based on irrelevant 3rd party related domains and threat reports:
One of the domains that falls under that “cryptomining” category is supportxmr[dot]com. [..] This is indicative that a domain is highly suspicious
Another domain that caused the spike in traffic is a mining pool: minexmr[dot]com. [..] according to multiple sources (in addition to our own categorization) this site has malicious intent. [..] ThreatCrowd is one site that agrees with our diagnosis where multiple users have voted that this site is in fact malicious
The quotes are from a HackerNoon article posted on Christmas Day, titled Should You Block All Monero-Related Domains? Crypto Scams Set To Rise in 20223 that tries to scare sysadmins into blocking all access to Monero domains on their network and (conveniently) using the security tools provided by his company6:
This raises the question: Should network administrators block XMR domains on their network? If nearly 50% of them are malicious and their use is generally meant for cybercriminals and not your traditional cryptocurrency investor, there’s a strong case to be made for this decision.
He concludes the post by sending readers to a DNS comparison page on his website:
Not all DNS security providers have a cryptomining category. Check out the benchmark report to see who does, and how they fare in head-to-head comparisons.
It is clear to me why Santa didn’t visit this year: he doesn’t appreciate FUD/shady marketing.