The UK government launched its 2022 Cyber Security Strategy on 15 December 2021, outlining its ambitious plans to improve the resilience of UK institutions and businesses while protecting the country's interests in cyberspace. The strategy signals a more involved approach by the government, which previously relied heavily on the private sector for leadership. The government's stated commitment to a 'whole of society' approach sounds really good on paper, but what exactly does it really mean? more
Last year, I reported on the possibility that LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite-based systems might be a gamechanger for the delivery of high-speed data services, including internet access, to people in regional and remote Australia. What has become clear with the rollout of the NBN is that the quality of data connections in metropolitan cities in many cases has improved, but that the rest of Australia doesn't have a similar experience. more
Is it really 2022? Is it? Although many might view 2021 as another "lost" year due to the pandemic, filled with Zoom™ meetings, virtual conferences, working from home and restricted travel - there were a number of notable domain name stories which deserve to be highlighted. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 biggest domain name stories of 2021 - let's go! more
One of the first in-depth reviews I’ve found for T-Mobile’s fixed cellular broadband was published in the Verve. It’s not particularly flattering to T-Mobile, and this particular customer found the performance to be unreliable – fast sometimes and barely functioning at other times. But I’ve seen other T-Mobile customers raving about the speeds they are receiving. We obviously can’t draw any conclusions based upon a single review by one customer... more
This is the 10th edition of my annual Internet Governance Outlook. The first one was published on CircleID on January 3, 2013, just a couple of weeks after ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). I wrote: "Anyone who expected that with the end of the Dubai Conference, the heated debate on the future regulation of the Internet will slow down should remember the fairytale of the knight's battle with the seven-headed dragon. Hardly a head is cut off, another one is growing." more
One of the consequences of our increased use of broadband is a big increase in the amount the data that we store outside our homes and businesses. The numbers are becoming staggering. There are currently about 3.7 billion people using the Internet, and together we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of online data every day. The trends are that by 2025 we'll be storing 160 zettabytes of data per year - a zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes. I store a lot more data online than I used to. I now store things in the cloud all day long. more
Avivah Litan, the storied Gartner analyst, laid it down succinctly for insiders in her blog two and one-half years ago. She said, "Web 3.0 will transform us from Web 2.0's monetization via surveillance capitalism and advertising to monetization built directly into the protocol that is equally available to any connected user." Translated, that means we'll control our destiny by owning and managing our credentials for logging into systems, content, financial resources, and, importantly, our data. And, we are told, blockchain technology will enable all that. more
Recently, there has been an interesting development in the liability of Internet intermediaries in Germany, and I will comment here in this text. The "Act on Copyright Liability Online Content Sharing Service Providers" began to apply on August 1, 2021 in the country. This act is a German attempt to deal with the controversy generated by the approval in 2019 of the new European directive on copyright, specifically with article 17. more
On December 14, 2021, Dot Hip Hop, LLC (DHH) filed an Urgent Reconsideration Request following ICANN staff inaction (for its over four-month delay) of its Assignment Request for the .hiphop Registry Agreement. Not only did the ICANN Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) decide against considering the Reconsideration Request on an urgent basis, but on its last day of business for 2021, ICANN Org decided to retaliate against DHH for filing the Reconsideration Request in the first place ... more
There is no such thing as a 25/3 Mbps broadband connection, or a 100/20 Mbps broadband connection, or even a symmetrical gigabit broadband connection on fiber. For a long list of reasons, the broadband speeds that make it to customers vary widely by the day, the hour, and the minute. And yet, we've developed an entire regulatory system built around the concept that broadband connections can be neatly categorized by speed. more
Happy Holidays. In September 2021, Apple rolled out iOS 15. For high volume email senders, Apple Mail now essentially tracks every email sent as an "open." Seemingly if you are a campaign engineer, high volume sender or ESP, this change can radically affect 25% - 45% of your email subscriber base, across both B2B, B2C or D2C. Inside your email analytics platform, you should see the specific percentage of Apple Mail users in your database, thus a significant rate of change ( delta) regarding inflated "open rates." more
The .web Independent Review Process (IRP) Panel issued a Final Decision six months ago, in May 2021. Immediately thereafter, the claimant, Afilias Domains No. 3 Limited (now a shell entity known as AltaNovo Domains Limited), filed an application seeking reconsideration of the Final Decision under Rule 33 of the arbitration rules. Rule 33 allows for the clarification of an ambiguous ruling and allows the Panel the opportunity to supplement its decision if it inadvertently failed to consider a claim or defense, but specifically does not permit wholesale reconsideration of a final decision. more
ICANN hosted a Resolver Operator Forum in mid-December, and the session had several interesting presentations that I would like to comment on here... The first presentation in this forum was from Paul Mockapetris. He pointed to the original academic published paper, Development of the Domain Name System, by Paul Mockapetris and Kevin Dunlap, published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’88. The paper noted that by 1983 it was obvious that the shared HOSTS.TXT file was not a scalable solution... more
It's that time of the year for me to get out the crystal ball and peer into 2022... I have no idea why it took a year for the administration to tee up a new Chairman and recommend a fifth FCC Commissioner. But once a new Commissioner is seated, the new FCC will tackle reinstating some version of Title II regulation, accompanied by net neutrality regulations. For yet another year, this won't come from Congress, which is the only permanent solution. more
Are you passionate about preserving the global, open Internet? Do you have experience in Internet standards, development or public policy? If so, please consider applying for a seat on the Internet Society Board of Trustees. The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people’s lives, and a force for good in society. Our work aligns with our goals for the Internet to be open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy. more
Join the upcoming discussion today on the past, present and future of the Internet in Afghanistan in the context of the Middle East. Panelists will address the national and international challenges and opportunities Afghans face in the changing environment of global Internet governance and sanctions laws. more
CENTR has published the latest edition of its CENTRstats Global TLD report, a quarterly publication that presents statistics and trends in domain name registrations of European country-code domains and the wider global market. more
Google Cloud has landed its muchly anticipated subsea cable, Grace Hopper in Bude, Cornwall. The 16-fiber pair Google-funded cable will connect New York (United States) to Bude (United Kingdom) and Bilbao (Spain). more
CENTR has just published the latest edition of its CENTRstats Global TLD report, a quarterly publication that presents statistics and trends in domain name registrations of European country-code domains and the wider global market. more
Colonial Pipeline, which accounts for close to half of the United States East Coast's fuel, has shut down its operations due to a cyberattack. The incident, believed to be the largest successful cyberattack on oil infrastructure in the U.S., was disclosed over the weekend. more
A multi-year investigation into 2017 net neutrality rulemaking finds 18 million fake comments were filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and half a million fake letters were sent to Congress. more
SpaceX on Tuesday disclosed that it has received 500,000 preorders for its Starlink satellite internet service and that it anticipates no technical problems meeting the demand. more
New Zealand's .nz operator, InternetNZ, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability against authoritative DNS servers. The vulnerability called TsuNAME was first detected in February 2020 in the .nz registry and found that it could be exploited to carry out Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across the world. more
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Government of India, approved permissions today to Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) for conducting trials for use and applications of 5G technology. more
Internet service was down for nearly 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, over the weekend after beavers chewed through a crucial fiber cable, resulting in "extensive" damage. According to a statement from the area's telecom provider, Telus, the outage also affected some cable TV customers and caused disruptions to local cell phone services. more
The US Department of Defense gave a small unknown Florida company control to millions of its dormant IP addresses, minutes before President Trump left office. According to reports, the unknown Florida company, Global Resource Systems LLC, initially obtained control of 56 million Pentagon-owned IP addresses on January 20 and later increased to near 175 million IP addresses. more
The celebrated security researcher, Dan Kaminsky, widely known for his work on discovering cruicisl DNS security flaws, Sony Rootkit infections and pupular talk at the Black Hat Briefings. more
ISPs in the U.S. saw a significant surge in both downstream and upstream traffic, increasing at least 30% and as much as 40% during peak business hours and as much as 60% in some markets, according to a new report from the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG). more
Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .org top-level domain, today launched the DNS Abuse Institute, a centralized effort to combat DNS Abuse. In its news release, PIR said the Institute "will bring together leaders in the anti-abuse space to fund research, publish recommended practices, share data, and provide tools to identify and report DNS Abuse." more
Despite several groundbreaking technical achievements over the past nine years, Google's parent company Alphabet has decided to end the Loon project. The company said the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization (ICANN org) announced that all of the current 1,195 generic top-level domains (gTLDs) have deployed Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). more
Donuts stated today that it has completed the acquisition of Afilias announced on November 19. Donuts' CEO Akram Atallah says the company is now ready to begin the integration plan promising minimal disruptions to customers. more
The Government of Niue, a small island 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, launched proceedings today demanding a "redelegation" of its country code top-level domain, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more
Cloudflare and Apple, along with Fastly, on Tuesday announced a new proposed DNS standard that separates IP addresses from queries preventing an entity from seeing both at the same time. more
According to an announcement on Monday, the Internet Society has agreed to extend its existing financial commitment to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for an additional term of six years. more
Sponsored byVerisign
Sponsored byVerisign
Sponsored byWhoisXML API
Sponsored byMarkMonitor
Sponsored byAppdetex
Sponsored byIPXO
A zero-day vulnerability found in Log4j, a logging library commonly used in Java, was detected on 9 December 2021. The vulnerability known as "CVE -- 2021 -- 44228" or "Log4Shell" enables attackers to execute codes and access all data on an infected machine remotely. more
This week, CSC and SecurityScorecard - the global leader in cyber security ratings for enterprise organizations - released an important piece of research in a whitepaper that shows a company's choice of domain registrar really does matter when it comes to cyber security. more
Threat actors reportedly attacked 29 government agencies worldwide in a recent malicious campaign. The attacks were attributed to China-based advanced persistent threat (APT) group Nickel, which has been known to trail its sights on governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. more
Updating your domain portfolio governance policy regularly will allow you to steadily move away from less effective methods for your business and into a stronger overall digital transformation strategy. more
It’s not uncommon to see free web hosting providers get abused as part of phishing campaigns. IBM X-Force Exchange, in fact, published three indicators of compromise (IoCs) related to such an incident. more
The ability to retrieve historical WHOIS information can be essential for the cybersecurity community, particularly when it comes to threat hunting and cybercrime investigation. This investigative capability is highlighted in our latest downloadable white paper "Digging Up Zombie Domains: What WHOIS History Reveals about 3,800+ Verified Phishing Hosts" where we analyzed thousands of verified phishing hosts and their historical WHOIS records. more
The November 2021 PhishLabs Quarterly Threat Trends & Intelligence Report indicated the finance, social media, and telecommunications industries as phishers’ most targeted sectors. Last month, we analyzed a squatting campaign targeting U.S. Bancorp to determine if other banks were at risk, this time we’ll look into the top 3 phishing industry target – telecommunications. more
Locky has been around since 2016, contributing to the total amount lost to ransomware worldwide, which has to this day reached US$20 billion in the U.S. alone. It usually gets delivered to users’ computers via emails with malicious attachments in the form of macro-laden Word documents. more
Radix's .Store Domains recently announced the closure of their #IdeaToStore contest, sponsored by Shopify. The contest invited aspiring entrepreneurs to share their ideas for an online store, and nearly 5000 people signed up. The winners walked away with cash prizes up to $30,000 along with exclusive Q&A and mentoring from the judges. more
Today, we released the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief, which shows that the third quarter of 2021 closed with 364.6 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains, a decrease of 2.7 million domain name registrations, or 0.7%, compared to the second quarter of 2021. more
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on 28 October in Connect 2021, introduced Meta, which will be Facebook’s parent company, along with the organization’s various apps and technologies. According to Zuckerberg, "Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses." more
A typosquatting campaign targeting U.S. Bancorp was uncovered a few weeks ago, potentially posing a threat to the financial institution and its customers. As of this writing, four domains and their IP resolutions were identified as indicators of compromise (IoCs). more
An ongoing cybersquatting campaign targeting MetLife, a global insurance company, was reported by IBM Exchange X-Force, listing 12 malicious domains. We dug deeper into the campaign as part of our goal to expand lists of indicators of compromise (IoCs). more
An Entrepreneurs on Fire Podcast with Seth Godin and Sandeep Ramchandani! We were already fans of John Lee Dumas’s Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast, but the excitement for this particular episode was immense. Aptly titled “Ignite Your Online Business,” the episode hosted marketing maverick Seth Godin and a global thought leader in web services, Sandeep Ramchandani. more
The Brand Registry Group (BRG) is the global association supporting the needs of dotBrand Top-Level Domain (TLD) operators and promoting the benefits of dotBrand TLDs across the world. more
When the holidays roll around every year, online searches for toys increase, giving counterfeiters the opportunity to sell knock-offs of popular items. This time of year can prove expensive -- not just in terms of cash flow, but safety too. Consumers looking for a bargain may not even think about toy safety, or recognize that they're buying a fake, inferior product. more
Details about an ongoing cybersquatting campaign targeting Turkish Airlines were recently unveiled, naming 13 malicious domains connected to the threat. As one of our primary goals is to expand published lists of indicators of compromise (IoCs), we dug deeper into the campaign to determine if the threat is confined to Turkish Airlines or if other industry players are at risk as well. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.