I registered an expired DMARC reporting domain (gca-emailauth.org) for $10. It had been published as the aggregate-reporting address in Global Cyber Alliance DMARC training docs going back to a 2019 bootcamp, and at some point it lapsed.
Shortly after registration, aggregate DMARC reports for 86 domains across 20+ organizations started arriving.
56 belonged to The Toro Company (NYSE-listed), including myturf.com, their distributor platform, which sits at p=none. The rest - University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point (14 subdomains), the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Ennis ISD (Texas), Great Prairie AEA (an Iowa education agency serving 35,000 students), two county governments, and several commercial domains.
For most of these it was a second rua address sitting behind a working commercial processor (Proofpoint, in Toro's case). Reports still arrived at the primary.
GCA's engineers later traced it to a former partner who'd held the domain and let it lapse - the dependency was never written down.
As of my last sweep, 65 of the 86 still publish the endpoint. We disclosed the vulnerability to everyone whose reports we were receiving. Only 21 domains got fixed, and almost nobody replied.
After 8 months of owning the domain, we finally coordinated a transfer back to GCA.
I registered an expired DMARC reporting domain (gca-emailauth.org) for $10. It had been published as the aggregate-reporting address in Global Cyber Alliance DMARC training docs going back to a 2019 bootcamp, and at some point it lapsed.
Shortly after registration, aggregate DMARC reports for 86 domains across 20+ organizations started arriving.
56 belonged to The Toro Company (NYSE-listed), including myturf.com, their distributor platform, which sits at p=none. The rest - University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point (14 subdomains), the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Ennis ISD (Texas), Great Prairie AEA (an Iowa education agency serving 35,000 students), two county governments, and several commercial domains.
For most of these it was a second rua address sitting behind a working commercial processor (Proofpoint, in Toro's case). Reports still arrived at the primary.
GCA's engineers later traced it to a former partner who'd held the domain and let it lapse - the dependency was never written down.
As of my last sweep, 65 of the 86 still publish the endpoint. We disclosed the vulnerability to everyone whose reports we were receiving. Only 21 domains got fixed, and almost nobody replied.
After 8 months of owning the domain, we finally coordinated a transfer back to GCA.