2016 has brought many changes to the political world. One of the biggest changes we've seen is the explosion of new news and polling websites. With this explosion however, has sprung up thousands of fake sites as well. These sites are created to do everything from distribute malware, spread false stories, or simply troll political parties, candidates, and their supporters. Fake polling sites seem to be the latest rage with several popping up that have even been cited by political campaigns. Some like NBCPoll.com are made to look like an official site, borrowing logos from legitimate sites but only a deep dive into the registration and IP data can you find that it is a fake site out of some third world country. Another fake polling site that has just popped up is USDailyWire.com. We will use this polling website to show how you can tell a fake polling website from a legitimate one.
Note: This is not a discussion about accurate polling or polls that may use biased data. This is about actual fake websites using fake data and names. USDailyWire.com started hitting several web blogs and forums today, including Free Republic, one of the largest Conservative forums, with poll results that are well outside other national polls. This in itself, is not unusual as sometimes a small change in methodology can yield different results. However, with such a big difference in polling results, it promoted us to take a closer look at this polling website. Here is how we determined it is a fake poll.
1. Do you recognize it? There are some polling firms that everyone recognizes, Pew, Pubic Policy Polling, and Gallup to name a few. These names have been around a long time and have built good reputations for their accuracy. The name USDailyWire probably doesn't seem familiar to you, and it shouldn't. More on that to come.
2. The next thing we checked is the website itself so we can understand the methodology. In the case of USDailyWire.com, they do not list any methodology or internal data that supports how they gathered their data, only high level results.
3. In addition to methodology, there are other important elements missing from their website that any legitimate business or polling website would have. Simple things like a copyright notice, statement of ownership, DMCA notice, etc. What jumps out with USDailyWire.com is it has none of that. Digging a little deeper into their website shows it is a Wordpress blog with just three total posts.
4. We mentioned before that the name USDailyWire.com should not be familiar to you. There is a reason for this. The next thing we checked was the Archive.org data for this website. Archive.org has no history of this website cached in its records. Now things are getting unusual. Why doesn't archive.org have a record of this website? A quick WhoIs search shows us why.
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=usdailywire.com USDailyWire.com was just registered two weeks ago. It was registered to a domain collection service, Wild West Domains, not an actual business.
5. Now the plot thickens. We decided to check the IP of USDailyWire.com. Rather easy to do.
https://www.site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html Then, we reversed searched this IP address. This IP is being shared by hundreds and hundreds of other Wild West Domains websites all registered about the same time and a random search shows most are placeholder sites with fake web pages or dummy data in them.
https://www.virustotal.com/en/ip-address/192.0.78.24/information/ All of this together is strong evidence this is a fake poll. Not having any methodology listed alone should be a red flag. We go back then to one of our original questions, why do this? The simple answer isn't that they are trolling a campaign or candidate, nor does it seem in this case, they are spreading malware. No, what this case appears to be is a domain squatter putting out fake stories in order to boost the traffic and thus the value of his domain name in order to resell the domain at a profit. A very, very common tactic in the web domain industry.
So don't be taken in. If something seems off, do a little checking to determine if you are being taken for a ride with false data.
