new type of spam (or is there a better name for it)?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Dear Prof. Farber,

If you choose to post this message, please remove my identifying
info. All I need at this time is extra visibility for the hijacked
domain...

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My professional organization (ZZZ) uses URLs like this: ZZZ2001.org,
ZZZ2002.org, etc. for our annual conferences. To avoid perpetual
charges, after each conference is over, we stop paying for the domain
name.

It turns out that some opportunistic spammer has bought the domain
names for some of our recent conferences and has done something very
nasty to them - namely, preserve most of the text (including names of
organizers, etc.) but replace all hyperlinks with pointers to porn
sites. It has been suggested to go after them and claim copyright
infringement, but any attempts to contact them have been unsuccessful
so far.

My sysadmins tell me that this sort of behavior is not uncommon on the
Web these days. My recommendation to our executive committee has been
to stop using such disposable domain names and instead use
ZZZ.org/ZZZ2001, etc. as conference URLs (using httpd aliases to point
to the actual site).

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