Afilias’ Director of Domain Security, Greg Aaron, accepts the award on September 23, 2010.Recognized for Excellence in Registry Services for DNSSEC and Anti-Abuse efforts

Afilias, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure services and the registry provider for the .INFO domain, has been awarded a 2010 Excellence in Registry Services award from the Online Trust Alliance. Afilias was recognized on Thursday, September 23rd at the Online Trust Alliances’ fifth annual 2010 Excellence in Online Trust Awards in Washington D.C. for its innovative leadership role in online safety initiatives over the past year.

Afilias’ cyber security initiatives included its pioneering Anti-Abuse Policy for the .INFO domain, which has helped .INFO to continuously score one of the lowest phishing uptimes for all generic top-level domains (TLDs). It also includes cross-industry collaboration initiatives which have helped suppress two of the largest cyber-gangs and incidents in the Internet’s history, Avalanche and Conficker. In addition, Afilias has worked to increase implementation of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which is the only known protection against cache-poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks.

“We appreciate the recognition of our work to enable a more trustworthy Internet and owe thanks to a very cooperative industry, including our domain name registrars who have been responsive in helping us address domain abuse,” said Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Afilias. “We will continue to strengthen our anti-abuse program and will add DNSSEC protection to more than a dozen registries in the months ahead.”

The Online Trust Alliance specifically cited Afilias as exemplifying excellence in online trust “for the commitment to working with the registry community, ICANN, APWG and other organizations advancing DNSSEC and developing .ORG. Their development of tools successfully have helped to block over 2.5 million Conficker domains and aided anti-abuse policies, resulting in the suspension in over 100,000 abusive domains.”

“Afilias is committed to defeating abusive uses of domains and, since introducing our anti-abuse policy in 2008, we have demonstrated measurable results in fighting phishing, malware, and spam,” added Greg Aaron, Director of Domain Security for Afilias. “Collaboration with our registrars, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, law enforcement, and security vendors and researchers have helped make our efforts successful. This results-oriented approach and expertise sets our registry services apart.”

About The Online Trust Alliance (OTA)
The OTA’s mission is to create and promote business practices and technologies to enhance online trust and the vitality of e-commerce and online services. Formed in 2004, the OTA is a global non-profit organization representing the Internet ecosystem, supporting user choice and controls, protection of critical infrastructure, privacy and data governance, promoting marketing best practices and self-governance. For more information on OTA please visit https://otalliance.org/