.sas could be the first contested dot-brand gTLD

Scandinavian Airlines System Group is to apply to ICANN for a generic top-level domain, .sas, in what could turn out to be the first example of a contested dot-brand.

The company has agreed to explain its thinking during The Top Level, a conference happening in London later this month.

The agenda for the meeting states that SAS will deliver a presentation entitled: “SAS: Why we made the strategic decision to apply”.

Linn Drivdal Mellbye of conference organizer CloudNames, the Norwegian registry services provider, confirmed in a tweet minutes ago that the sought-after gTLD is .sas.

The string “SAS” has multiple meanings.

Indeed, for about three minutes this post originally stated — wrongly — that the applicant giving the presentation was the North Carolina software giant SAS Institute.

If the American SAS also applies for .sas, it may have to fight it out with the airline at an auction.

SAS — the Scandinavian one — becomes the second dot-brand applicant to come out in as many days, following StarHub’s news yesterday.

The company is based in Stockholm and employs about 25,000 people.

.com passed 100 million mark in October

Verisign’s .com registry passed the 100 million domains under management milestone in October, the company’s monthly ICANN registry report revealed today.

The exact number of domains under management in .com on October 31 was 100,540,971, having increased by a net 690,243 registrations over the course of the month.

That’s a pretty big deal, but for some reason Verisign didn’t make any announcements about it at the time.

ICANN registry reports, which all contracted gTLDs must submit, are filed three months after the fact, for competitive reasons.

The number of domains in the .com zone file – which is what most people track to follow the fortunes of TLD operators — differs from the total number in the registry.

Domains which do not have name servers or are in special registry status codes such as Pending Delete do not show up in the zone file.

Today, RegistrarStats reports 100,052,046 domains in the .com zone, while HosterStats’ count yesterday was 100,045,666. The registry is likely to have about 1.5 million more, however.

Startup America obtains s.co and offers free .co domains to entrepreneurs

Startup America, an initiative to encourage entrepreneurship in the US, has relocated to S.co and will offer a free one-year .co domain registration to registered members.

For .CO Internet, the .co registry, this is a pretty sweet marketing coup.

The Startup America Partnership is a private initiative created a year ago in response to White House calls for grassroots economic stimulus.

It’s chaired by former AOL chief Steve Case, and has over a billion dollars in support commitments from tech heavyweights such as IBM, Intel and HP.

Signing up to the program grants entrepreneurs resources such as discounted accounting software and access to workshops. Now, they’ll also get a free .co domain for a year, if they want one.

As part of the deal, Startup America, which was located at startupamericapartnership.org, can now be found at s.co.

While .CO has been commanding prices for single-letter .co domains of, anecdotally, over a million dollars, I’d be surprised if any significant money has changed hands here.

For a Colombian TLD to become part of a flag-waving American initiative such as this, giving it access to its core target customer base… well, let’s just say that even if it gave away s.co for free, which I think it probably did, it would still be a very smart deal from .CO’s end.

Hackers stole data from Verisign, Blacknight

Hackers broke into Verisign’s corporate network and made out with sensitive data, it emerged today.

The attacks happened in 2010 and the company does not believe its all-important domain name infrastructure – which supports .com and several other top-level domains – was compromised.

Reuters broke the news today, but the attack was actually revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last October. The filing said:

In 2010, the Company faced several successful attacks against its corporate network in which access was gained to information on a small portion of our computers and servers. We have investigated and do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System (“DNS”) network. Information stored on the compromised corporate systems was exfiltrated.

The filing, which was required under recent SEC disclosure rules, goes on to say that the attacks were “not sufficiently reported to the Company’s management” until September 2011.

It adds that Verisign does not know whether the “exfilitrated” – ie, stolen – data was used by the attackers. The filing does not say what was taken.

Back in 2010, Verisign was still a security company. It did not sell off its SSL business to Symantec until August that year. The filing does not say whether SSL data was breached.

As one of the logical single points of failure on the internet, Verisign is of course the subject of regular attacks, mainly of the performance-degrading distributed denial of service variety.

The bigger worry, as Reuters rather breathlessly notes, is that if hackers could compromise the integrity of the DNS root or .com/.net zones, it could lead to mayhem.

In unrelated news, the domain name registrar Blacknight today revealed that it got hacked on Tuesday.

The attackers may have got away with contact information – including email addresses and telephone numbers – for up to 40,000 customers, the company said.

Financial information such as credit card numbers was not compromised, Blacknight said.

The company has contacted Irish data protection regulators and will also inform the police. Customers are advised to change their passwords.

If you’re a Blacknight customer you’ll also want to be on the lookout for “spear-phishing” attacks in the near future. When the bad guys know your name, it can lead to a more convincing phish.

.me beating .co in start-ups?

The .co top-level domain may have more registrations, but more tech start-ups are opting for .me domain names, according to an informal study.

Doctoral student Thomas Park compiled a list of 1,000 start-ups added to TechCrunch’s CrunchBase database last year and found that entrepreneurs chose .co 1% of the time, versus 1.7% for .me.

As caveats, the difference between the two TLDs only works out to seven companies and .me, which launched in 2008, does of course have a two-year head start over .co.

I’m also guessing that CrunchBase has an English-language bias, which could skew the results. While .co has meaning in more countries it lacks the call-to-action punch of .me in English.

Nevertheless, I think the results are interesting because .CO Internet heavily targets start-ups in its marketing and currently has twice as many domains under management (over 1.1 million) as doMEn, the Afilias/Go Daddy joint-venture .me registry.

Park’s results show that .me had a 0.50% share in 2010 and a 0.80% share in 2009 while .co managed to get one company (0.10%) on the list during the half of 2010 it was live.

The survey found that .com is the runaway first choice for entrepreneurs, with about 85% of the start-up market, but you knew that already.