South Korean Banks Receive DDoS Threat from Hacker Group, Record Ransomware Payment Demanded

Various sources including South Korea's news agency Yonhap are reporting that a hacker group has threatened to launch a DDoS attack against seven South Korean banks unless they pay about 360 million won (US$315,000) in bitcoin. more

Activists for Access to Medicines and Internet Rights Develop Brussels Principles for Online Sales

RightsCon, the world's leading summit on tech, society, and human rights has been called "the Davos of Digital Rights" (www.rightscon.org). At RightsCon 2017, the sixth event of the annual summit series on human rights in the digital age, the global human rights community came together in the heart of European politics and policymaking on March 29-31, 2017. More than 1,500 experts from 105 countries around the world, across diverse geographic and stakeholder lines, joined together to produce measurable outcomes on the most pressing and emerging issues threatening human rights in the digital age. more

Cycling Legend Greg LeMond Sues Cybersquatters Upward of $6.6 Million

A federal restraining order has been issued against a father and son accused of registering several domain names based on cycling legend Greg LeMond's name and his company. more

Watch LIVE: ICANN 59 DNSSEC Workshop - June 26 at 7:00am UTC

Want to learn more about DNSSEC deployment challenges? Interested in learning about a DANE middlebox for HTTPS? Curious about how the upcoming DNSSEC Root Key Rollover will affect systems? And have you heard about the CDS and CDNSKEY records for DNS? What are they -- and what impact will they have on ICANN policies? more

Mozilla, National Science Foundation Offer $2M Prize for a Decentralized Web

Mozilla and the National Science Foundation have announced a $2 million prize for ideas that decentralize the web; prizes will be available for both early-stage design concepts and fully-working prototypes. more

Cyberattack on UK Parliament Halts Email Access

UK parliament has been the target of a "sustained and determined" cyberattack by hackers attempting to gain access to Member of Parliaments' and their staffers' email accounts. more

Pharmacy Chain Boots Terminates Its New TLD .boots

"Boots becomes latest company to terminate new gTLD but other '.brands' go full steam ahead." Trevor Little reporting in World Trademark Review. more

Cisco Introduces Intent-Based Network That Can Learn, Adapt and Mitigate Threats

Cisco has launched an intent-based networking solution designed to be intuitive and adapt; a new approach claimed to be one of the most significant breakthroughs in enterprise networking. more

How to Dispute a Third-Level ‘Country-Code’ .com Domain Name (Such as nike.eu.com)

Shortly after I recently wrote about WIPO's new role as a domain name dispute provider for the .eu ccTLD, the Forum published its first decision on another type of "eu" domain name: eu.com. The decision involved the domain name nike.eu.com. What makes this case interesting is that it represents one of the few .com domain name disputes that includes a country-code in the second-level portion of the domain name. more

Three Reasons Why Broadband Is So Unreliable

We all take the predictability and reliability of other utilities for granted. So why is broadband such a frustrating exception? Why do our Skype calls fail mid-way? What makes Netflix buffer like crazy? How come our gaming sessions are so laggy? Imagine if the design of your electrical supply was optimised to apply the biggest possible voltage and current to anything that was plugged in. That would clearly be ridiculous! more

Honda Halts Domestic Car Production Plant Due to WannaCry Virus in Computer Network

Production at a Honda domestic vehicle plant was halted for a day this week as a result of the discovery of WannaCry ransomware in the computer network, the company reports.  more

Cloud Computing and Digital Divide 2.0

Internet connectivity is the great enabler of the 21st century global economy. Studies worldwide unequivocally link increases in Internet penetration rates and expansion of Internet infrastructure to improved education, employment rates, and overall GDP development. Over the next decade, the Internet will reinvent itself yet again in ways we can only imagine today, and cloud computing will be the primary operating platform of this revolution. more

Bloomberg: Pricing of New TLDs Seem “Kind of Random”, Sector in “Flux”

Bloomberg's Economic Editor, Peter Coy, suggests that the Top-Level Domain pricing seen in the market today appears to represent a big pricing experiment in a sector of the economy "that's in flux". more

Trump’s Cuba Policy and Its Impact on the Cuban Internet

On June 12th, I speculated on Trump's forthcoming Cuba policy and its impact on the Internet. He outlined his policy in a June 16th speech and the Treasury Department published a FAQ on forthcoming regulation changes. It looks like my (safe) predictions were accurate. I predicted he would attack President Obama, brag about what he had done, make relatively minor changes that would not upset businesses like cruise lines, airlines, and telecommunication and hotel companies. more

New Standard for Reverse Domain Name Hijacking

Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) Rule 1 defines Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) as "using the Policy in bad faith to attempt to deprive a registered domain name holder of a domain name"... There has been a mixed history in granting and denying this remedy for overreaching rights. Some Panels consider RDNH regardless whether it has been requested (even if respondent defaults in responding to the complaint); others will only consider the issue if requested. more