Anti-Typosquatting & Cybersquatting Solutions

Cybercrime After the Sunrise: are the new gTLDs nests of abuse?

ICANN's new gTLD program, initiated in 2007 and started in 2013, resulted in the appearance of more than a thousand generic top-level domains, confirming the significant business demand for these. Some are related to regions or locations (like .amsterdam), some to communities (e.g. .pharmacy) or brands, and many of them are just words having a marketing value. But apart from the opportunities for customers, unfortunately they also pave new ways for cybercriminals for abusing the domain name system. Even though ICANN has built safeguards into the process to mitigate this risk, it has become a widely accepted surmise that new gTLDs are frequently the base camps of spamming, phishing, botnets and other forms of abuse. Is it really the case?

Is a HTTPS Webpage as Secure as Expected?

Encrypted communication on the Internet is most commonly realized by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Webpages communicating sensitive content, including Internet banking, webshops, etc. use the HTTPS protocol which is based on this. E-mail servers, when communicating with clients in a secure manner, use the relevant e-mail transfer protocols such as SMTP, IMAP or POP3 over SSL/TLS.

In current practice web pages are often hosted at least in part by third-party hosting providers or content-delivery networks. Thus the hardware systems we communicate with belong to these third parties, which may host many other pages of completely different entities. And, in order to establish desired secure communications, these parties have to get hold of private keys of these entities. Currently, many providers overtake even the management of keys from their clients which gives rise to profound and possibly severe security implications...