You’ve owned a domain for eight years. The slogan? Rolls off the tongue. The title? A household name—and one that’s unique to you. But then it happens: You chuck your coffee halfway across the room when you realize your domain is now in the hands of someone else, thousands of miles away.

Over the years, multiple users on online forums have seen their expired domains pop up elsewhere, like China, for example, where they have the option to buy it back for several hundred dollars—or in some cases, a little over a thousand.

These sorts of domain-related issues are complicated, says Adam Marrè, the CISO at cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf.

“There are people who stalk [listings] to try to find domains that are unused or have not been renewed, and they do it for a number of reasons,” he told IT Brew. “One reason [is that] you could buy it from a famous popular company and essentially make them pay you to get it back.”

Read more here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

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Five restaurants, 12 cashiers, and one founder from Shanghai, China. Chi Zhang has been in the restaurant industry for nearly 10 years. In 2022, a restaurant he ran with friends shut down and they filed for bankruptcy. But like many entrepreneurs who hold tight to the idea of failing fast, that didn’t stop Zhang from trying again.

The following year, he founded Happy Cashier, which has gone viral on X due to the company’s unique approach to handling customers’ in-person food orders.

Zoom zoom. As customers enter the restaurant, one of those locations being Sansan Chicken in New York’s East Village, they’re met by a TV monitor screen. Using Zoom’s customizable avatar filters, a real person—over 8,000 miles away—is logged in to Zoom, ready to process food orders and answer customers’ questions about Japanese fried chicken.

IT Brew caught up with Zhang in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to chat about his entrepreneurial journey, how he really feels about AI, and what he and his team learned after a recent Zoom meeting was compromised.

Read more here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Sometimes ransomware actors just want the cheap stuff.

Cybersecurity company Sophos, in an April 17 report from its Sophos X-Ops research team, noticed an uptick in low-cost, rudimentary ransomware—a deal for aspiring threat actors and a challenge for defenders.

“It’s much harder to detect something that there are only 20 copies of in the world,” Christopher Budd, director of threat research at Sophos X-Ops, told IT Brew.

The group compared the offerings to the cheap handguns flooding the US firearms market in the 1960s and 1970s: junk guns.

Between June 2023 and February 2024, the Sophos team found 19 varieties of “independently produced, inexpensive, and crudely constructed ransomware.” Some lacked polished graphics, and some featured programming languages like C# and .NET, which “have a shallower learning curve,” according to the report.

“This appears to be a relatively new phenomenon,” the post read, while noting low-quality malware has been around for decades.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

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