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DNSAI to name most-abused registries, registrars

Kevin Murphy, May 31, 2022, 18:17:33 (UTC), Domain Services

The DNS Abuse Institute is to start publishing monthly reports that name the registries and TLDs with the highest level of abuse.

The organization’s Intelligence service is expected to land in September, a little later than was previously expected, according to a blog post from director of policy and programs Rowena Schoo.

DNSAI has partnered with Kor Labs, a project out of the Grenoble Institute of Technology, to supply the data, which will cover phishing and malware domains and differentiate between malicious registrations and compromised sites.

The Institute doesn’t consider spam DNS abuse unless it is used as a delivery mechanism for other types of abuse, in line with ICANN’s definition.

The decision to actually name (and in some cases, we should assume, shame) registries and registrars is an unusual one. Other, similar efforts tend to keep the data anonymous.

“We want to understand abuse persistence and whether it has been appropriately mitigated by registrars,” Schoo wrote.

DNSAI is a project primarily backed by .org manager Public Interest Registry.


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Comments (3)

  1. For clarification, Rowena is now an employee of the DNSAI as the Director of Policy and Programs, and no longer on the Advisory Council or with Nominet. We’re rebuilding the website, and the AC section is out of date.

  2. Garth Miller says:

    If DNSAI is publishing and releasing monthly reports that rank registries, I hope they also make public all the raw data that forms the basis of their rankings for peer review.

    Given that DNSAI is not regulator and is largely funded by a large TLD manager, publishing a ranking of peers seems a rather bad idea.

    Historically lists that rank without also making the raw data publicly available have tended to bring the publisher into disrepute.

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