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Widespread Issues with Domain Registration Accountability Have a COVID Nexus

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

My Interisle partners and colleague Greg Aaron have published a detailed study that measures the effectiveness and impact of ICANN's registration data access policies and procedures. This study reveals widespread problems with access to and the reliability of domain name registration data systems (WHOIS).

These failures have real-life security implications, which are being seen in the current wave of cybercrime accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic.

In our Press Release I make the comment that, “The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a recent explosion of cybercrime, with thousands of new domain names using terms like ‘covid’ or ‘corona’ being used to perpetrate spam, phishing, malware campaigns and to peddle fake products,” and

“Investigators need quick, unencumbered access to domain registration data to disrupt COVID-themed attacks before they cause losses and harm. The problems our study exposes have made that all but impossible.”

COVID-themed attacks are current events that call attention to problems that have persistently interfered with efforts to mitigate cyberattacks. 

Greg Aaron, author of the work, also quoted in the press release, adds, “Domain registration data is supposed to be available in guaranteed, reliable ways. Unfortunately, we documented widespread failures, both technical and legal,” said Greg Aaron, the author of the study. “These problems make it hard to distinguish bad Internet actors from good, severely impacting public security. And they make it harder to communicate and solve a range of other problems, eroding trust on the Internet.”

We examined the practices of 23 registrars, which collectively sponsor more than two-thirds of the registrations in the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to determine whether they comply with ICANN's policies and related contractual obligations, and also to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

The study found widespread problems: most notably,

  • Registrars fail to meet their contractual obligations. A significant portion of the registrar industry is still not running reliable and compliant WHOIS services.
  • After one-and-a-half years, a significant percentage of registrars do not fully comply with ICANN's Temporary Specification.
  • A number of registrars mis-handle their obligations under GDPR.
  • Some registrars prevent people from reaching out to domain owners for any purpose. Some registrars do not make the required contactability information available as required. Others have deployed procedures that make it unnecessarily difficult for people to contact their registrants. In some cases, the contactability mechanisms provided by registrars literally fail to deliver.
  • Some registrars even constrain access to non-sensitive domain registration data (the “public data set”). This set contains no personally identifiable information, so there is no need to protect it, and restricting access to it prevents its use for important and legal purposes, such as cybersecurity.
  • RDAP services are not yet technically reliable enough for use. RDAP became mandatory for registrars and registry operators to provide in August 2019, but as of March 2020 the rollout is moving very slowly, and there are notable operational and noncompliance problems.

These and other findings show that access to critical registration data has been significantly curtailed over the past two years, and ICANN compliance problems. The report also recommends actions that can be taken to ensure a healthy Internet and naming system. The full report can be found at: http://interisle.net/sub/DomainRegistrationData.pdf .

Posted at 08:28 AM in All matters security, Anti-Malware and Anti-phishing, Domain names and DNS | | Comments (0)

Microsoft dismantles global spam delivery infrastructure (Necurs)

Tuesday, 17 March 2020
Microsoft and partners from 35 countries recently took action to dismantle the Necurs spam infrastructure.
 
Microsoft's post calls Necurs a botnet but provides details that illustrate how much more than a botnet Necurs is:
 
  1. The Necurs infrastructure served as a spam delivery platform for spam, cryptomining and DDOS attacks.
  2. The spam campaigns contained stock scams, fake pharma, and Russian dating scams, malware and ransomware.
  3. The Necurs operators leased services to other criminal actors to perpetrate these attacks.
These are characteristics that the Counsel of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime identifies as criminal activities in its Guidance notes on Spam.
 
Many of the partners that Microsoft mentions are Top-level Domain registries. These operators are preemptively blocking the registration of the millions of algorithmically generated domains (DGA) that Necurs uses to name its command-and-control (C&C) host, to make its botnet resilient.
 
Kudos to the registries for their role. No thanks to the registrars whose business practices make it trivial and inexpensive to register millions of domains.
 
Takeaways:
 
ICANN, please note that spam is no longer "just content" and hasn't been for nearly a decade.
 
Everyone else, please note that registry operators, especially the gTLDs that are delegated by ICANN, are by policy and contract at the mercy of (ahem) accredited registrars like NameCheap, who is currently being sued by Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for business practices that facilitate fraud. Facebook has also filed suit against OnlineNIC. These actions are long overdue and suits of this kind are perhaps appropriate for other targeted business or industries.
 
We can all only hope that litigation will resolve what multi-stakeholder consensus policy cannot: make it too expensive to sell millions of cheap domains annually and registrars will be forced to be more proactive in mitigating criminal use of domains.
 
New action to disrupt world’s largest online criminal network:
 
Protecting People from Domain Name Fraud
 
Fighting Domain Name Fraud
 

Posted at 09:52 AM | | Comments (0)

Spotlight Posts

  • Widespread Issues with Domain Registration Accountability Have a COVID Nexus
    My Interisle partners and colleague Greg Aaron have published a detailed study that measures the effectiveness and impact of ICANN's registration data access policies and procedures. This study reveals widespread problems with access to and the reliability of domain name registration data systems (WHOIS). These failures have real-life security implications, which are being seen in the current wave of cybercrime accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. In our Press Release I make the comment that, “The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a recent explosion of cybercrime, with thousands of new domain names using terms like ‘covid’ or ‘corona’ being used to perpetrate...
  • Report: Criminal Abuse of Domain Names, Bulk Registration and Contact Information Access
    My Interisle Consulting Group colleague, Dr. Colin Strutt and I have published a report, Criminal Abuse of Domain Names: Bulk Registration and Contact Information Access http://interisle.net/criminaldomainabuse.html In this report, we study "bulk registration misuse" by criminal actors. Bulk registrations refers to the practice of rapidly acquiring domain names, using these in an attack, and abandoning them as if they were throw-away ("burner") phones. These domains are a critical resource for cyber criminals. We use reputation block list (RBL) data to reveal how the use of bulk registrations, coupled with the crippling of registration data access by the ICANN Temp Spec...
  • Facts & Figures: Whois Policy Changes Impair Blocklisting Defenses
    Two independently conducted studies demonstrate that the onset of masking Whois contact data has had the direct, corresponding, and ongoing effect of reducing the number of blocklisted domains, dramatically undermining the efficiency of this and other security countermeasures.
  • Conservative abuse reporting throws new TLD program under the bus
    ICANN has released a January 2019 domain abuse report generated from the Domain Abuse Activity Repor...
  • APWG and M3AAWG Survey Finds ICANN WHOIS Changes Impede Cyber Investigations
    The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) have collaborated to conduct a survey of cyber investigators and anti-abuse service providers to understand how ICANN’s Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data has affected their access and usage of domain name registration information and their ability to mitigate abuse. I served as Principal Investigator for APWG and M3AAWG for this project. I received strong subject matter expertise support from both working groups. From our analysis of 327 survey responses we find that the changes to WHOIS access following ICANN’s implementation of the Temp Spec...
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