Exposing the dark side of subdomain registries

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Exposing the dark side of subdomain registries

Wednesday, December 3. 2008

It sounds like the title to a Star Wars parody made by a bunch of college kids but it's actually the Anti Phishing Working Group's latest report.

And a fascinating read it is too. I'm sure most people don't know what a subdomain registry is – I certainly didn't before reading the APWG report. We're not talking about actual registries as we understand it in "standard" domain name terms. These are in fact providers who offer free hosting services which include providing a free subdomain with one the provider's registered domain names. One example would be MYDOMAIN.FREEHOST.COM.

Because these accounts are often free to set-up and can be accessed without users being asked to provide any real information about themselves (not even payment information, the accounts being free), they provide a useful safe haven for phishers.

APWG provides suggestions on what subdomain registries, registrars and ICANN can try and do about this. It's certainly a topic worth learning about and the APWG report is a great way to do that.

If you're interested, download the 11 page report here.

Posted by Stephane Van Gelder in Scams at 22:32 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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As it usually does, the APWG is claiming the sky is falling and is asking for repressive action.

Subdomain registries are perfectly OK under the registration rules of most TLD (for instance, ".fr") and often used for good purposes.

I'm not sure that turning them to a parody of ICANN-sanctioned TLD would be a good thing.

#1 Stéphane Bortzmeyer (Homepage) on 2008-12-05 10:04 (Reply)

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