The Notepad++ project is seeking the public’s help in taking down a copycat website that closely impersonates Notepad++ but is not affiliated with the project. There is some concern that it could pose security threats—for example, if it starts pushing malicious releases or spam someday either deliberately or as a result of a hijack.
Oh, this is something that didn’t occur to me before, but I actually create similar look-alike websites (that are usually just a proxy-pass) for a few tools or libraries pretty often. I’m using them at work during pentesting engagement to legitimize our c2 api calls. (So for example you have c2 as a notepad++ DLL calling to api.notepadplus.plus or something like that, which is our c2, and the notepadplus.plus is just a proxypass for the real page.)
I never realized that a search engine may actually pick it up during the time it’s up, and that the post may have very well be about something I made.
I hear ya though. I usually filter by IP for dev sites for the same reason. It’s not 100%, but it keeps them from getting indexed. I don’t think there’s anything interesting enough to make an effort worthwhile in my case anyway.