McAfee calls for ICANN spam crackdown
The security company McAfee has claimed that ICANN needs to try harder in the fight against spam by cracking down on rogue registrars.
In a report released today, the company makes the bold assertion that ICANN “holds the trump card to the spam problem” and that it should step up its compliance efforts.
Although ICANN cannot stop spam itself and does not link spammers to the Internet, it does accredit the registrars that sell the domains that cybercriminals use to fill our inboxes with advertisements and malware
McAfee notes that ICANN has previously de-accredited spammer-friendly registrars such as the notorious EstDomains, but that it needs to do more.
ICANN needs to continue this trend against registrars that knowingly provide domain services to cybercriminals. The organization also needs to harden its policies that define under what circumstances an accreditation can be revoked, so that it can take quicker action against rogue registrars.
The claims come in a report entitled “Security Takes The Offensive”, available here.
The report does not lay all the blame for spam at ICANN’s door, of course. The author also goes after ISPs and the SMTP protocol itself.
The report does not point out that there are 250-odd TLDs over which ICANN has no registrar accreditation powers whatsoever.
Despite my best efforts with Google, I’ve been unable to find a single instance of McAfee publicly participating in ICANN policy-making, so I have to wonder how serious it is.
At least guys like KnuJon are not afraid to show up at meetings and stir things up a bit.
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