Fergie's Tech Blog

Registrars Ignore Domain-Name Abuse

Ellen Messmer writes on NetworkWorld:

For legitimate businesses, a domain name is a way to hang a shingle in cyberspace. In the criminal world, domain names are a key part of botnet and phishing operations, and cyber-criminals are plundering domain-name registrars around the world to get them.

Criminals are amassing domain names by registering them under phony information, paying with stolen credit cards or hard-to-trace digital currencies like eGold, and breaking into legitimate domain-name accounts. To add to the problem of domain-name abuse, some rogue registrars often look the other way as the money rolls in.

“There’s absolutely a big problem,” says Ben Butler, director of network abuse at Go Daddy, an Arizona-based domain-name registrar that’s authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the appropriate ICANN-accredited registries to sell domain names based on the generic top-level domains (gTLD) that include .com, .aero, .info, .name and .net.

posted by Fergie @ 9/14/2009 01:40:00 PM