As part of a campaign called ‘Operation In Our Sites,’ the government has already illegally seized the domains of nine movie streaming sites. According to an insider source at TorrentFreak, ICANN took control of the domains and then handed them to the government– in clear violation of domain owner rights.

The government was poised to seize The Pirate Bay’s domain as well as MegaUpload.com, but changed its mind at the last minute for some unknown reason. This does not mean these sites are safe, however. As Professor Pouwelse of the Delft University of Technology put it, “Hollywood lawyers have discovered the soft underbelly of piracy.”

ICANN has declined to comment on the matter.

Budapest police conducted a raid late last week targeting torrent sites. Visiting several hotels and a technical college, it seized 50 servers containing 500 TB of data. According to police, some of the data was used to aid in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.

Many of Hungary’s BitTorrent sites are now down. The largest, Ncore, has nearly 900,000 peers. The Pirate Bay, which has servers in Hungary, shut down its Hungarian operations after receiving a warning. One of the main targets of the raid, Bithumen, is still operating from Germany.

The video above shows some of the servers police seized. Hungary undertook two similar raids in 2007 and 2009

Some of the firms mentioned in the document include UK2, Tucows, France Telecom, Enom and AOL. Among other things, ICANN lashed out against several of the registrars for misconfigured WHOIS servers that leave data open to hackers.

Enom caught fire for the services it allegedly provides to illegal online pharmacies. The report states that it, “has transitioned from being a passive service provider to become an active facilitator of illicit criminal traffic, and possibly a knowing accessory.”

Read the full 96-page report here. Now that ICANN has called out these misguided registrars, let’s see the organization take some action.

Source | The Inquirer

It used to be very easy for criminals to register .ru names with fake identities. But as of April 1, all registrants have to provide a copy of a passport or business registration papers in order to buy a domain. China implemented a similar system several months ago to clean up its .cn extension.

Will Russia’s actions improve .ru’s reputation? Probably, but by making registration such an inconvenience, many legitimate users will find another TLD to register. And as Rodney Joffe, chief technologist at Neustar put it, “It’s pushing the malicious activity elsewhere. If it’s so much of a hassle, [criminals will] say, ‘Screw it. I’m going to register another top-level domain.’”

Source | PCWorld
Photo | Flickr

Close behind China is Romania, which is responsible for 21.1% of malware. Next was the United States at 13.8%. Symantec found that although the majority of malware appears to come from North American mail servers, the original source is usually abroad.

Interestingly, a great deal of malware now targets people in specific roles rather than the public at large. Individuals with titles such as “director, senior official, vice president, manager, and executive director” tend to be hit with more spam, as do workers in the public policy and defense industries.

Photo | clix

SOCA says it is too easy for organised crime to fake domain contact data and wants ICANN to make falsifying contact data more difficult. This would make it much easier to track down scammers, phishers, and other cyber criminals.

Short of verifying every domain registrant’s contact data and instituting criminal penalties for data-fakers, I really don’t see how this is going to happen. Even if more stringent efforts were taken, I’m sure criminals would find a way to bypass them. After all, don’t criminals still manage to get credit cards, passports, and drivers’ licenses all the time?

As is generally the norm, Google contended that the domain violated its trademark and that it was being used in bad faith. The registrant, an Indian national by the name of Racha Ravinder, might have been able to put up some form of defense. He put the nail in the coffin with his response to the complaint, however, stating, “I will sell my domain googlenetbiz.com for USD 50,000 only, do you buy it.”

By submitting this statement, Ravinder unknowing committed cybersquatting. If the WIPO didn’t have a reason to hand the name over before his response, it did after.

Source | Express India
Photo | Flickr

Unfortunately, this decrease does not necessarily mean the number of cybersquatters has gone down. Instead, complainants are saving money by filing for multiple domains at once. The actual number of domains disputed before panels has actually increased.

According to the WIPO and NAF, 90% of cases last year were decided in favour of the complainant.

The FBI sent out an alert today warning Americans of this danger. It said to watch out for spam emails and verify the legitimacy of non-profits before donating. According to the Associated Press, more than 400 domains related to the disaster have been registered since Monday. Most of them will likely be used for illegitimate purposes. Unfortunately, most of these scammers will probably never be tracked down and caught.

Photo | Flickr

China has a long history of Internet censorship and has just recently started going after domains. Last month, it deleted some 775 adult domains.

The country’s government is able to take domains offline only when the registrar is located in China. The .com TLD itself is operated by an American company. I find it odd that even though a person from China can obtain the go-ahead from the American registry to register an available .com (an automatic process), the Chinese government can remove a registration, even though it has no right to interfere with the transaction whatsoever.

Photo | Flickr

This is because while certain letters in two different scripts might look exactly alike, they have different meanings in their respective language. Cyrillic, for example, shares letters with the Latin script. Each language also uses a different encoding, meaning that browsers will respond differently according to the encoding they are set to display.

This is a problem because someone could theoretically register an IDN that looks like a legitimate domain but really isn’t. An individual in Ukraine, for instance, could register the domain “raural.com.” However, the unicode encoding used in North America and much of Europe would display “raural.com” as “paypal.com.” See the problem here? Both users of Latin scripts and anti-phishing software alike would be unable to distinguish the Cyrillic “paypal.com” from the real one.

The creation of IDNs is long past due, but as is the case with the adoption of any new technology, there are always a few bumps along the way.

Photo | kilokilo

Unfortunately, this practice is hard to track down given the shear size of the Internet. Thousands of requests are made for IPs daily, but there is no system in place to verify them. Who should get the last few remaining IPs? Is a request a true need or merely a convenience?
In the coming year, expect to see more attention given to questions like these.

Personally, I think more effort should be put into verifying IP requests. Anything that cuts down on cyber crime and frees up precious IPv4 addresses is a good thing.

Source | Ars Technica
Photo | clix