The U.S. Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ("ACPA") is a federal law -- part of the Lanham Act that deals with trademarks and unfair competition. It says that a person can be liable if he or she registers a domain name that contains another's distinctive trademark with a bad faith intent to profit from that mark. One issue that has arisen over the years is whether registration that can give rise to liability means only the first time the domain name is registered, or whether it applies to the re-registration... more
I recently had the opportunity to speak on a podcast with Dave Bittner at CyberWire to discuss how .AI is giving cybercriminals a new avenue to take advantage of some of the largest companies in the world based on research findings from CSC's 2023 Domain Security Report. Below is a summary of the key points discussed during this podcast. more
In the last year, the company that runs the Turkish Domain Registry has made many changes to how the extension is run. First, it has a brand new portal for registrars to interact with, liberalizing the extension .COM.TR, so registrants are no longer required to meet local presence rules, and it has launched a new dispute process to help brand holders recover domain names. more
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) leads the charge to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, and we at Public Interest Registry (PIR) are dedicated to supporting their efforts. We are honored to work with them across two important programs: Domain Alerts and TLD Hopping List. IWF services have been extremely successful in addressing CSAM on .ORG over the past five years more
From the creation of DNSAI Compass ("Compass"), we knew that measuring DNS Abuse1 would be difficult and that it would be beneficial to anticipate the challenges we would encounter. With more than a year of published reports, we are sharing insights into one of the obstacles we have faced. One of our core principles is transparency and we've worked hard to provide this with our methodology. more
It seems that every day, a new artificial intelligence (AI) capability emerges, posing exciting possibilities for technological advancements -- but also great potential to equal or greater risks. Cybercriminals have taken notice of this rapid surge in the popularity of AI technologies and are attempting to take advantage. more
Domain names give your intellectual property visibility, as well as provide function for your company's infrastructure. Vital domain names are simply too important to be left exposed. To protect them, you can add extra layers of security to your digital brand with easy, secure, server-level protection in addition to multi-level locks that combat domain name system (DNS) hijacking and protect against unauthorized changes and deletions to your critical domain names. more
Companies today manage hundreds or even thousands of domain names that support their organization, their visitors from different countries, and their brands and trademarks. They register misspelling of their names as a defensive strategy to protect their brand from online fraud, or from losing traffic to simple user typos. more
In this article, I present an overview of a series of 'proof-of-concept' studies looking at the application of domain-name entropy as a means of clustering together related domain registrations, and serving as an input into potential metrics to determine the likely level of threat which may be posed by a domain. more
On the sunny beaches of Anguilla -- a small island of just 35 square miles -- I'm sure artificial intelligence (AI) is the last thing people are thinking about. The primary industries of Anguilla, set in the Leeward islands in the Caribbean, are tourism and offshore banking. However, this nation has been assigned the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .AI -- which is being repurposed to represent artificial intelligence. more
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