Defunct website taken over by spammer. How to stop them?
- by Robert
A friend of mine used to publish a small literary fiction magazine, both in print and on the web. In 2011 she announced that she was quitting, put a note on the website, and carefully unwound the subscriptions. She continued hosting the site (with all the back-issues available for free) until the beginning of this year, when she let the hosting lapse and the domain name expire.
Today she discovered that some unknown person has purchased her former domain name and put up a modified version of her entire site. The design is different but all the content is the same, including all of the back-issues of the magazine (and the stories by diverse authors contained within), their cover art, news posts, and even her contact information. All the content would have been available from Archive.org, so it's no mystery how they got it.
The only thing noticeably changed is a column added to the front page titled "Favorite Videos", with around 35 links to Youtube videos. The links are named things like "Video (Worry)" and "Video (Squirting)" and the videos all feature a man named Leo giving dubious advice and promoting his life-coaching website. Here's one of the suspect videos. There does not appear to be any connection between the content of the videos and my friend or her magazine.
I also posted to the Security StackExchange to ask why someone would do this and what the security risks are to her. What I want to know here is, what can she do to stop them?
To be clear she doesn't want the domain name back. She just doesn't want her name and copyrighted material used deceptively.
Also, what (if anything) could she have done when shutting down her website to avoid this happening?
