Wendy and all, I agree. Registries should not be held accountable for "Content". They are in part at least responsible for DNS configuration as such is a safty and security issue. Which was what this Mcafee study was all about. From my and our members experiance and to a great extent, our independant study, your accurate in that older DN's "Tend", but are all not necessarly less "infested" or "Dangerous" than newer DN's. Dot info domain names are far too often more "Dangerous" from a DNS configuration stand point than most, other than .cn .hu, .ca, .it, .co.uk, com.za, .com.au, .in and .ru, and more recently, .us. -----Original Message-----

From: Wendy Seltzer <wendy@seltzer.com> Sent: Jun 9, 2008 12:23 PM To: "Brendler, Beau" <Brenbe@consumer.org> Cc: At-Large Worldwide <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] Bad domains McAfee study

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I'm not Afilias, but I'd tend to say that domain name doesn't equal content, and a registry is not and should not be responsible for domains' uses.

I'm not sure this study is any more representative or useful than "older sites tend to be less infested than newer ones" or "URLs that start with WWW differ from those that don't."

- --Wendy

Brendler, Beau wrote:

...

Thanks, Jaqueline, that's interesting. I'd also be really interested to hear Afilias' response to this characterization of .info.

-----Original Message----- From: Jacqueline A. Morris [mailto:jam@jacquelinemorris.com] Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 1:33 PM To: Brendler, Beau Cc: At-Large Worldwide Subject: Re: [At-Large] Bad domains McAfee study

Hi Beau There's been some discussion on the cc lists about this as you can imagine. Here's the .hk response to the media:

We are very surprised to learn about the research findings from McAfee. In fact, in a meeting organized by Anti-Phishing Working Group last week in Tokyo Japan, Hong Kong Domain Name Registration (HKDNR) was invited to present its best practice in combating suspicious websites. We are trying to get in touch with the research author to gain more insights into this research and the findings. The research report shows the figures and analysis of the whole of last year. In particular, the report claimed that 9.9 million websites have been tested. It is suspected that most of the malicious sites were tested several months ago and no long exist.

HKDNR is committed to providing a safe Internet environment for the community and has put in place various measures against suspicious websites. We have been working closely with Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA), Hong Kong Police and Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre (HKCERT) to monitor and control the situation. In August last year, in conjunction with the list of suspicious domains provided by OFTA, we suspended over 10,000 domains in regard. Following that initiatives, the situation with '.hk' related suspicious websites has been greatly improved.

We actively review our systems and domain name registration procedures and policies. Particularly, we have more stringent documentary requirements to combat suspicious websites registered overseas in order to catch up with the fast-changing Internet world. We also want to call for the general community to be aware of the issue and report to related authorities whenever they have queries accessing a web site.

Brendler, Beau wrote:

...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24966835?GT1=43001

"McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are ".hk" (Hong Kong), ".cn" (China) and ".info" (information)."

Apologies if you've seen this already.

BB

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