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ICANN Notifies Ten Worst Spam Registrars 6-18-2008 |
ICANN has responded to a recently released analysis of the top 10 worst registrars in terms of spam and junk content hosting domains, and has taken measures to notify them. |
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More than half of those registrars named had already been contacted by ICANN
prior to publication of KnujOn’s report, and the remainder have since been
notified following an analysis of other sources of data, including ICANN’s
internal database. With tens of millions of domain names in existence, and tens
of thousands changing hands each day, ICANN relies upon the wider Internet
community to report and review what it believes to be inaccurate registration
data for individual domains. To this end, a dedicated online system
called the Whois Data Problem Report System (“WDPRS”) was developed in 2002 to
receive and track such complaints. ICANN sends, on average, over 75 enforcement
notices per month following complaints from the community. We also conduct
compliance audits to determine whether accredited registrars and registries are
adhering to their contractual obligations,” explained Stacy Burnette, Director
of Compliance at ICANN. “Infringing domain names are locked and websites removed
every week through this system.” And while it the data speaks for itself,
the issue of responsibility-forwarding is a bit more complex than it seems,
allowing certain observations in the cluster analysis to be easily
re-engineered. For instance, the first registrar with the highest illicit
score, has a total of 897,962 domain names, where the 15,551 spam domains
registered through it were found in 1,644,986 spam messages featuring the
domains. Hypothetically, if I were a spammer, I can superficially engineer the
top ten worst domain registrars if I purchase a couple of hundred recently
dropped domain names historically registered through a specific registrar,
launch a massive spam campaign and send out 5 million messages to increase the
bad reputation of the registrar whose historical registration services I’m
abusing. The results would vary based on the number of spam messages sent, and
the domain name registrar that would pop-up as having registered the highest
proportion of the dropped or deleted domain names that I’ve recently purchases
on a volume-basis, without even bothering to see who’s the
registrar. Furthermore, excluding the more pragmatic abuse of domain
names in the face of typosquatting and cybersquatting next to illicit domain
registration, I find the idea of intentionally registering a domain to be used
for hosting of a spam site, a very Web 1.0 one. Just like the domain
name registrars who emphasize on efficiency, and therefore violate ICANN’s
compliance practices, spammers and scammers are also interested in efficiently
obtaining as many domain names as possible, this is where the dropped or deleted
domains services come into play in their full Web 2.0 capacity, with several of
these offering purchases on a volume basis with the idea that the more domains
you purchase, the less you’ll pay for them. And with the transparency build by
these servics, there are proprietary domain portfolio management tools created
intentionally for the purpose of mass-registrations and management of such
domain farms. Therefore, I think the emphasis should be put on who’s
been hosting the spam/scam domain and proving the malicious parties with stable
uptime for a given period of time, and which are the registrars lacking any
brandjacking monitoring capabilities, compared to assessing which registrar’s
services were used to register the domain that was later one used for malicious
purposes.
Otherwise, we’re shifting the discussion to the point where’re
we’ll argue which top level domain name is the most malicious one, where
clustering is also possible with CNNIC’s .CN domain name for one yuan campaign
which already resulted in 8.4 million .CN registered (bogus) domain
names. Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber
threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence
gathering, malware and E-crime incident response. Dancho is also involved in
business development, marketing research and competitive intelligence as an
independent contractor. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and
maintains a popular security blog sharing real-time threats intelligence data
with the rest of the community on a daily basis.
Source: www.webhostdir.com | | | | |
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