Coronavirus

The State of DNS Abuse: Moving Backward, Not Forward

ICANN's founding promise and mandate are optimistic -- ensure a stable and secure internet that benefits the internet community as a whole. Recent months, however, have highlighted the uncomfortable truth that ICANN's and the industry's approach to DNS abuse is actually moving backward, ignoring growing problems, abdicating on important policy issues, and making excuses for not acting. Further, the impending failure of ICANN's new WHOIS policy to address cybersecurity concerns will add fuel to the fire, resulting in accelerating DNS abuse that harms internet users across the globe. more

What We’ve Learned About Upload Bandwidth

Until the pandemic hit, I rarely thought about upload bandwidth. I mostly used upload bandwidth to send files to people, and I rarely cared if they received the files immediately -- I was happy as long as files got sent. But the pandemic changed everything for millions of people. All of a sudden, homes were unable to function well due to problems with uploading. more

Registrar Influence on the Domain Security Posture of the Forbes Global 2000

In the 2021 Domain Security Report, we analyzed the trend of domain security adoption with respect to the type of domain registrar used, and found that 57% of Global 2000 organizations use consumer-grade registrars with limited protection against domain and DNS hijacking, distributed denial of service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle attacks (MitM), or DNS cache poisoning. On average, the adoption of domain security controls is two times higher for enterprise-class registrars than for those using consumer-grade registrars. more

New CSC Research Finds Significant Lack of Redundancy for Enterprise DNS

As outlined in CSC's recent 2020 Domain Security Report: Forbes Global 2000 Companies, cybercriminals are disrupting organizations by attacking the protocol responsible for their online presence -- their domain name system (DNS). When a DNS is overwhelmed with traffic due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or configuration error, content and applications become inaccessible to users, affecting both revenue and reputation. more

Measuring Abuse: How Much COVID-Related Abuse Is There, Really?

Like measuring COVID's impact, so too measuring the impact of COVID-related abuse on the Internet is difficult, there are those that would foolishly dismiss the danger entirely, others over-state the problem, perhaps to prompt sales of tools and services. The amount and type of abuse varies from network to network, and to declare everything is fine based on one world-view you believe to be ubiquitous, or that the sky is falling based upon another, extrapolated to 'everybody else' is simply poor analysis. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 9: Articles 26-30

As we work on this final CircleID essay addressing the last four Articles in the UDHR, we explore how the UDHR provides the principles on which to build the rights and responsibilities of digital citizenship and bring integrity and trust to cyberspace and the Internet ecosystem. We reflect on what we have learned. For us, the authors of this series, we are reminded that trust in the processes of government, business entities, and society is central to the wellbeing of society, our communities, our families, and ourselves. more

Breaking the Rules on Counterfeit Sales: The Use of Hidden Links

Counterfeiting is big business. A 2021 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimated that the international trade in counterfeit and pirated products was worth up to $464 billion in 2019, or around 2.5% of all world trade. A significant proportion of this trade occurs via digital channels, where global annual expenditure on eCommerce is more than $4 trillion. more

Putting COVID-19 Traffic Growth Into Perspective

Nokia Deepfield is another company that works in the background on the web, and that analyzes data traffic patterns for the big ISPs. Their June 4 report on web traffic reports about the same thing we're hearing from most large ISPs -- the volume of web traffic suddenly shot up since the onset of the pandemic. Nokia Deepfield says that the increase in traffic has settled in at about a 25% increase over pre-COVID levels. more

High-Speed Fiber Overtakes DSL as OECD Countries Add 21 Million Fixed Broadband Connections in the Pandemic Year

High-speed fiber Internet subscriptions surpassed copper-wire DSL connections across OECD countries for the first time in 2020 as the need to move work and home life activities online during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a record 21.15 million new fixed broadband connections (including fiber, DSL, cable, and others) in the year to end-December 2020. more

Are We Ready for Big Bandwidth Applications?

There is a recent industry phenomenon that could have major impacts on ISP networks in the relatively near future. There has been an explosion of households that subscribe to gigabit data plans. At the end of 2018, only 1.8% of US homes subscribed to a gigabit plan. This grew to 2.8% by the end of 2019. With the pandemic, millions of homes upgraded to gigabit plans in an attempt to find a service that would support working from home. more

New Research from CSC on the Impact of COVID-19 on Internet Security and Safety

Hackers are using company domain names for malicious attacks more than ever before. Established research shows that phishing and related malware attacks most commonly occur from a compromised or hijacked legitimate domain name, a maliciously registered, confusingly similar domain name, or via email header spoofing. Domain security intelligence is the first line of defense in preventing domain cyberattacks. more

Freedom of Expression Part 5: COVID Vaccines not Mandatory

In Part 4 of the Freedom of Expression series, I had highlighted my concerns about the lack of transparency in ingredients of all the COVID-19 vaccines, which has been addressed by Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, the same day (World Holocaust Day) I had raised these concerns. A recent Resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will see the further regulation of social media on content relating to COVID-19. more

Phishing Scams: How to Spot Them and Stop Them

Phishing scams are nothing new in the online security world and show no signs of subsiding. The scam starts when a fraudster sends a communication purporting to originate from a trusted provider and encourages the recipient, often with a conveyed sense of urgency, to click a link. That link leads to a fake site, usually intended to collect confidential login credentials or other personal information. In similar scams, the mail may encourage the recipient to open an attachment loaded with malicious content. more

An Afnic Study of the Global Domain Name Market in 2020, COVID Impact on ccTLDs

Afnic, the French Network Information Centre and manager of the .fr TLD, has just published its Afnic's Global Domain Name Market in 2020 Report on the global domain market in 2020. The study is based on ICANN statistics, information from registries, specialized websites, and its own research. This is an overview of global trends and an analysis of the mechanisms at work during the health crisis. more

Online Freedoms: Safeguards Must Be Balanced With Free Expression

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a major contextual factor of global internet governance discussions over the past year, and it appears that discussions in ICANN are no exception. Threats to the integrity and security of the DNS have become a regular topic of debate within the ICANN community. In recent months, these discussions have increasingly focused on the idea of 'DNS abuse' and, more specifically, COVID-19-related DNS abuse. more