News Briefs

Hundreds of Syrian Domains Seized As a Result of Trade Sanctions

"In apparent observation of international trade sanctions against Syria, a U.S. firm that ranks as the world's fourth-largest domain name registrar has seized hundreds of domains belonging to various Syrian entities, including a prominent Syrian hacker group and sites associated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad," reports Brian Krebs. "The apparently coordinated action ended with each of the site's registration records being changed to include Web.com's Florida address, as well as the notation 'OFAC Holding'." more

Arrest Made in Connection to Spamhaus DDoS Case

According to a press release by the Openbaar Ministerie (the Public Prosecution Office), a dutch man with the initials SK has been arrested in Spain for the DDoS attacks on Spamhaus. more

ICANN Releases 5th Round of Initial Evaluation Results - 169 TLDs Pass

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the fifth round of Initial Evaluation results, bringing the total number of applications that have passed the Initial Evaluation phase to 169. ICANN is targeting completing Initial Evaluation for all applicants by August 2013. more

Massive Spam and Malware Campaign Following Boston Tragedy

On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing, reports Craig Williams from Cisco. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explosions from the attack. Simultaneously, links to these sites were posted as comments to various blogs. more

Over 80 European Organizations Demand Protection for Net Neutrality

Today, more than 80 organizations, represented by The European Consumer Organization (BEUC) and European Digital Rights (EDRi), sent a letter to the European Commission demanding the end of dangerous experimentation with the functioning of the Internet in Europe and the protection of the principles of openness and neutrality. more

Fourth Round of Initial Evaluation Results for New TLDs

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the fourth round of Initial Evaluation results, bringing the total number of applications that have passed the Initial Evaluation phase to 131. ICANN is targeting completing Initial Evaluation for all applicants by August 2013. more

Total Domain Names Pass 252 Million Worldwide

More than six million domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2012, bringing the total number to more than 252 million domain names worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2012, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign. The increase of 6.1 million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 2.5 percent over the third quarter of 2012, and marks the eighth straight quarter with greater than 2 percent growth. Worldwide registrations have grown by 26.6 million, or 11.8 percent, year over year. more

Third Round of Evaluation Results for New TLDs

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the third round of initial evaluation results, bringing the total number of applicants to pass Initial Evaluation to 93. ICANN has now completed the initial evaluation of all but 13 IDN Top Level Domains. more

NCUC Workshop: One World, One Internet? New gTLDs & Competition in a Changing Global Environment

The Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) has organized and is holding a policy workshop, One World, One Internet? New gTLDs & Competition in a Changing Global Environment, next week in Beijing at ICANN-46. The program, which brings together top Western and Chinese experts, will explore pressures for integration versus fragmentation of the Internet and implications for ICANN, as well as different competition and regulation perspectives as they relate to new gTLDs. more

INET Denver: IPv4 Exhaustion and the Path to IPv6

Join IPv6 networking professionals from across North America, who will attend to learn the latest on IPv4 exhaustion and how to transition to IPv6. The INET Denver agenda will bring together top experts in the networking field to discuss the latest on IPv4 exhaustion in our market, and the TCO of IPv6. more

Second Round of Initial Evaluations for New gTLDs

Mary Iqbal writes to report that ICANN has released the second round of Initial Evaluation Results on March 29. ICANN is currently reviewing new gTLD applications at a rate of 30 applications per week and has plans to increase that to 100 per week. more

U.S. CERT Issues Alert on DNS Amplification Attacks

Neil Schwartzman writes to report that U.S. Cert issued Alert TA13-088A on Friday March 29, 2013. "It is a solid how-to guide to test for, and remediate DNS configurations that can be used for Distributed Denial of Service attacks." more

A Closer Look at Recent Submarine Cable Failures

In light of the recent submarine cable failures, Doug Madory from Renesys has a detailed report on what has happened to some of the providers in four countries along the route of the cable: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India. more

ICANN Launches the Trademark Clearinghouse Amid gTLD Expansion

ICANN today launched a database to enable trademark holders register their brands for protection against the upcoming new gTLDs. The Trademark Clearinghouse, according to ICANN, is the only officially authorised solution offering brands a one-stop-foundation for the safeguarding of their trademarks in domain names across the multiple new gTLDs that will go live from summer 2013. The cost of registering a trademark ranges between $95 and $150 a year. more

ICANN Releases Initial Evaluation Results for First Set of New gTLD Applications

The first round of Initial Evaluation results has been released exactly on schedule. On March 23, ICANN announced that 27 out of 30 new gTLD applications reviewed this round passed Initial Evaluation. The remaining three applicants are still marked as in Initial Evaluation. more