GoDaddy resets passwords for several hundred compromised accounts.
Web hosting provider and domain registrar GoDaddy has taken down more than 15,000 subdomains that were being used as part of a spam operation that lured users on web pages selling fake products.
Users would typically receive a spam email promoting a product, and if they'd click links in these emails, they'd land on one of these subdomains, hosted on legitimate sites -without the site's legitimate owner's knowledge.
The common theme among all the scammy subdomains was that they all sold products backed by bogus endorsements from celebrities.
Celebrity names used in these scams include Stephen Hawking, Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton, Wolf Blitzer, the Shark Tank TV show, and others.
Most of the products advertised via these subdomains were brain supplements, CBD oil, weight loss pills, and other dietary products.
A two-year investigation
GoDaddy wasn't the party who discovered this massive network of shady domains, but Palo Alto Networks security researcher Jeff White.
The researcher first encountered this gang's shady domains nearly two years ago, when he also started an investigation into their operations.
Ever since then, the researcher has been collecting spam email that the scammers have been sending out in droves each they, and indexing the subdomain URLs promoting these fake products.
