« Is office cleaning a proper analog for web security? | Main | Trusting Third-parties with your password »

Thursday, 29 October 2009

Nine ways to mitigate malicious domains

In collaboration with antiphishing, security, CERT, and financial communities, ICANN has collected a proposed list of measures for new TLD applicants to implement to mitigate malicious conduct involving domain names.

Vetted registry operators. Recommended by APWG and security experts in the financial industry, this measure is intended to ensure that no criminal organization can own or influence a registry operator (e.g., through indirect shareholding or ownership).

Demonstrated plan for DNSSEC deployment. An applicants will be expected to publish a detailed plan and timeline for signing their zone file and for signing delegations (domain names registered in its TLD).

Prohibition of redirection by TLDs.Acting on the recommendation of ICANN’s SSAC, the ICANN Board of Directors has agreed that applicants must return negative responses when a DNS query is made to a non-existent domain and must not synthesize (redirect) queries for error resolution or advertising purposes.

Removal of orphan glue records. Orphaned glue records frequently point to name servers that host malicious domains. This measure requires applicants to explain the policy they will enforce to ensure that a name server record in a delegation will not persist in the TLD zone file when the parent domain name is deleted from the zone.

Requirement for thick Whois records. This measure requires applicants to provide Whois output that identifies the sponsoring registrar, the status of the registration, the creation and expiration dates of each registration, contact information for the registrant and designated administrative and technical contacts, plus name server information.

Centralization of zone file access. Today, organizations must individually contract with TLDs registries to obtain (FTP) access to zone files. This does not scale to the potentially large numbers of zone files the new TLD program may spawn. This measure provides for the implementation of a common access point for organizations that require access to TLD zone files. (Look for a future article explaining how centralization of zone file access will be implemented).

Documented registry level abuse contacts and procedures. This expands the ICANN SSAC recommendation that all registrars maintain an abuse handling process and publish contact information. Registries will similarly be asked to have public and easily accessible abuse handling agents.

Participation in the Expedited Registry Security Request process. A GTLD registry uses the ERSR process to request a contractual waiver for actions it might take or has taken to mitigate or eliminate a present or imminent security incident of global significance. This measure allows ICANN and registries to maintain operational security during an incident.

Draft Framework for High Security Zones Verification.The high security zones verification program establishes a set of operational and security control standards that collectively improve confidence in the ability to maintain security, availability, confidentiality, and privacy of systems and information assets supporting critical registry IT and business operations.

The publication of this explanatory memorandum and consideration of these measures for new GTLDs within the ICANN process is a landmark event. However, it's critical that all interested parties recognize that this is a discussion draft only. Simply put, this is not a "done deal." To ensure that any or all of these measures are incorporated into the new TLD application process, you must voice your support through the ICANN public comment process http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/

Posted at 11:46 PM in Domain names and DNS |

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Laura Mather at Silvertail Systems posted a comment on this article at http://silvertailsystems.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/comment-on-icanns-malicious-domain-mitigation-policy/

Posted by: Security Skeptic | Friday, 13 November 2009 at 11:33 AM

Tom Kelchner wrote a complementary summary of this article at http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/fighting-malicious-web-sites-through.html

Posted by: Security Skeptic | Friday, 13 November 2009 at 11:02 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Find me on Mastodon and Facebook

Spotlight Posts

  • Interisle Study Reveals Alarming Rise in Online Abuse and Identifies Exploitable Links in Cybercriminal Supply Chains
    My Interisle colleagues and I today published our 2024 Cybercrime Suppy Chain study. We analyzed 16 million cybercrime events to expose a dramatic rise in criminal exploitation of name, address, hosting, and financial supply chains. Our year-over-year findings show that cybercriminals exploit lax policies to easily and cheaply obtain resources for phishing, malware, and spam campaigns. In our report, we provide actionable insights for those aiming to curb cybercrime. Among the major findings in the study, Interisle reports that: The total number of malware, phishing, and spam attacks grew year-over-year by nearly 54%, to nearly 16.3 million attacks. Spam doubled,...
  • Malware quarterly reports for July-September
    Malware quarterly reports for July-September 2024 is now posted at the Cybercrime Information Center. For the period... Malware identified as targeting endpoint devices increased 277% over the prior period. WordPress blog sites used for malware accounted for nearly all the malicious documents reported for this period. We continue to see an uptick in malicious scripts. IPv4 addresses reported for exhibiting characteristics of attackware and traffic injectors increased 38% to just under 1 million. ASNs in China and India again have the most IPv4 addresses reported for hosting malware. More malware trends for the period at https://www.cybercrimeinfocenter.org/malware-trends-july-september-2024. For historical reporting of...
  • Interisle's Phishing Landscape 2024 is here
    Our Interisle team today announced the publication of an industry report, Phishing Landscape 2024, A Study of the Scope and Distribution of Phishing. Interisle’s fourth annual study examines nearly four million phishing reports collected from May 2023 to April 2024 and provides historical measurements using over 15 million phishing reports collected at the Cybercrime Information Center over a four year period. Findings from the study: • The total number of phishing attacks grew to ~1.9 million incidents worldwide. • Phishing attacks hosted at subdomain providers increased by 450,000+ reported names, representing 24% of all phishing attacks. • The use of...
  • Malware Trends, January - March, 2024 posted at the Cybercrime Information Center
    2024 began with a rise in domain names reported for hosting malware unlike any we have seen since we began measuring malware attacks in 2021. The 1Q2024 Top 20 TLDs included 10 new gTLDs, 6 ccTLDs, and 4 legacy gTLDs. Only three TLDs remained in the top 5 TLDs (COM, NET, INFO) from the prior quarter. The ORG and BR TLDs were replaced by SHOP (over 3,000% increase) and TOP (over 700% increase). All but one registrar in 1Q2024’s Top 20 registrar ranking showed increases of 100% or more. Several registrars had 4- and 5-figure percentage increases in domains reported....
  • Malware Trends, January - March, 2024 posted at the Cybercrime Information Center
    2024 began with a rise in domain names reported for hosting malware unlike any we have seen since we began measuring malware attacks in 2021. The 1Q2024 Top 20 TLDs included 10 new gTLDs, 6 ccTLDs, and 4 legacy gTLDs. Only three TLDs remained in the top 5 TLDs (COM, NET, INFO) from the prior quarter. The ORG and BR TLDs were replaced by SHOP (over 3,000% increase) and TOP (over 700% increase). All but one registrar in 1Q2024’s Top 20 registrar ranking showed increases of 100% or more. Several registrars had 4- and 5-figure percentage increases in domains reported....

Search

My Photo

Categories