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Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Private domain registrations at 3FN

I gave a presentation to the AntiPhishing Working Group describing my findings from a study of domains hosted at 3FN. On 4 June 2009, a district court judge ordered the shutdown of 3FN service at the request of the FTC, who alleged that 3FN "actively recruits and colludes with criminals seeking to distribute illegal, malicious, and harmful electronic content including child pornography, spyware, viruses", "advertised its services "in a forum established to facilitate communication between criminals" and "actively shielded criminal clientele by ignoring take-down requests issued by security community, or shifting its criminal elements to other IP addresses it controlled to evade detection".

Through the assistance of FireEye Malware Intelligence Labs, I obtained a list of the domains hosted at 3FN. Such a concentration of alleged miscreant activity created a unique opportunity to study private domain registrations in an empirical way; in particular, I wanted to answer the questions "How prevalent are private domain registrations among domains hosted at 3FN?" and "How many "3FN" domains with private domain registrations allegedly host criminal or malicious content?" The presentation explains my methodology, reports the findings from the study and suggests possible future studies using a similar methodology.

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Posted at 02:57 PM in Anti-Malware and Anti-phishing |

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