Helping Keep The Internet Clean

A clean and crime free internet would be a good thing. Unfortunately, as we all know, the current reality is quite different and there is a constant onslaught of junk assaulting us all. Be it spam, malware, scams or anything else, there’s a lot of nasty behaviour being conducted online.

Is it all bad? No

Should we all suffer as a result of the bad behaviour of a few?

I’d like to believe not, which is why I’m a strong and vocal supporter of industry self-regulation.

With that in mind we’re delighted to announce our involvement in The Secure Domain Foundation.

The initiative was officially launched last week in Singapore, during the ICANN meeting, but we’re announcing our involvement today, as we’re here in Rust, Germany for World Hosting Days.

Here’s the full release:

Michele Neylon, CEO of Blacknight, the leading Irish domain registrar and hosting provider urges the Internet community to join The Secure Domain Foundation in their mission to combat malicious use of industry infrastructure.

The Secure Domain Foundation (SDF) is a Canadian non-profit organization conceived in 2012 to assist domain name registrars, registries (ccTLD and gTLD), hosting providers, and other Internet infrastructure providers in combatting the malicious use of their services. Neylon who has long been involved with law enforcement in the eradication of malware, fake pharma and other online abuses is a vocal supporter of the mission of the SDF.

The organization was created in response to a lack of formal response to issues of abuse within the Internet governance community. Among the goals of the organization is to provide registries, registrars and Internet infrastructure providers with the tools and intelligence that will enable them to proactively reduce malicious use of their services. The SDF seeks to do this by identifying and highlighting malicious actors in the domain name provider / infrastructure space and working with organizations such as ICANN, IANA, RIPE, ARIN, to develop and promote better global security policies.

SDF Co-Founder Norm Ritchie explains: “The Secure Domain Foundation was created in response to the lack of action from ICANN against malicious use of infrastructure. Registrars, registries and other providers need to be able to take proactive steps to protect their users online and the best way we can begin to do that is by gathering as much knowledge of who the bad actors are as we possibly can. We urge the entire infrastructure community to get involved as these are issues that can damage all areas of our industry.”

The SDF offers a free adversary intelligence API that allows their industry partners to obtain real time reputation and validation data on multiple data points including: postal address validation, phone number validation, name server reputation, email address reputation, IP address reputation, web browser fingerprint reputation, malware and botnet related domain name reporting and domain registrar abuse complaint turnaround rankings.

As of April 2014, the SDF has a searchable database consisting of over 115,000,000 records and analyse over 100,000 malicious code samples per day to identify threats and associated domain names.

Neylon who is also the Registrar Liaison of the SDF Steering Committee and Advisory board, explains: “The Secure Domain Foundation’s ethos and goals are aligned with our own, so we are proud to be associated with their work.” “The Internet is a force for good but it can and is abused by criminals and others. Organisations like SDF and others work to mitigate the negative impact that criminal behaviour can have on the eco-system and for those of us who like to evangelise the Internet as a good place to live and work their contributions are important.”

To learn more about the SDF, and fighting online abuse please visit http://www.thesecuredomain.org/ (http://www.thesecuredomain.org/)