While monitoring my Pi-Hole logs today, I noticed a bunch of queries for XXXXXX.bodis.com, where XXXXXX are numbers. I saw a few variations for the numbers, each one being queried several times.
Digging further, I found out these queries were caused by CNAME records on domains that look like they used to point to Lemmy/Kbin instances.
From what I understand, domain owners can register a CNAME record to XXXXXX.bodis.com and earn some money from the traffic it receives. I guess that each number variation is a domain owner ID in Bodis' database. I saw between 5 to 10 different number variations, each one being pointed to by a bunch of old Lemmy domains.
This probably means that among actors who snatch expired domains, several of them have taken a specific interest with expired domains of old Lemmy instances. Another hypothesis is that there were a lot of domains registered for hosting Lemmy during the Reddit API debacle (about 1 year ago), which started expiring recently.
Are there any other instance admins who noticed the same thing ? Is any of my two hypothesis more plausible than the other ? Should we worry about this trend ?
Anyway, I hope this at least serves as a reminder to not let our domains expire ;)
DNS engineer here, I'm not doing work on a weekend, but I will make you guys aware of digwebinterface.com great tool for running investigations like this
As a DNS engineer - do you own a shirt with the slogan “It’s always DNS.” on it?
It's not DNS until the firewall team cleans house and even then not until you happened to catch me between matches in the videogame I'm playing while waiting for something to break