Most new gTLDs use NameSentry after Famous Four signs with Architelos

Architelos yesterday announced that Famous Four Media has signed up to use its NameSentry security service across its portfolio of new gTLDs.
The company said that it now has 60% of launched new gTLDs on the platform, which gives registries a way to view potentially abusive domain names and automate remediation. That’s over 250 TLDs.
Famous Four only has five delegated gTLDs currently, but it has another 30 active applications. The bulk of NameSentry’s TLD base comes from early adopter Donuts, which has 157. Rightside, with its 33 new gTLDs, is also a customer.
Architelos said that .build, .ceo, .lat, .luxury, and .ooo have also recently signed up to the service.

Comment Tagged: architelos, famous four, namesentry

Human glitch lets hackers into ICANN

It’s 2014. Does anyone in the domain name business still fall for phishing attacks?
Apparently, yes, ICANN staff do.
ICANN has revealed that “several” staff members fell prey to a spear-phishing attack last month, resulting in the theft of potentially hundreds of user credentials and unauthorized access to at least one Governmental Advisory Committee web page.
According to ICANN, the phishers were able to gather the email passwords of staff members, then used them to access the Centralized Zone Data Service.
CZDS is the clearinghouse for all zone files belonging to new gTLD registries. The data it stores isn’t especially sensitive — the files are archives, not live, functional copies — and the barrier to signing up for access legitimately is pretty low.
But CZDS users’ contact information and login credentials — including, as a matter of disclosure, mine — were also accessed.
While the stolen passwords were encrypted, ICANN is still forcing all CZDS users to reset their passwords as a precaution. The organization said in a statement:

The attacker obtained administrative access to all files in the CZDS. This included copies of the zone files in the system, as well as information entered by users such as name, postal address, email address, fax and telephone numbers, username, and password. Although the passwords were stored as salted cryptographic hashes, we have deactivated all CZDS passwords as a precaution. Users may request a new password at czds.icann.org. We suggest that CZDS users take appropriate steps to protect any other online accounts for which they might have used the same username and/or password. ICANN is providing notices to the CZDS users whose personal information may have been compromised.

As a victim, this doesn’t worry me a lot. My contact details are all in the public Whois and published on this very web site, but I can imagine other victims might not want their home address, phone number and the like in the hands of ne’er-do-wells.
It’s the second time CZDS has been compromised this year. Back in April, a coding error led to a privilege escalation vulnerability that was exploited to view requests by users to new gTLD registries.
Also accessed by the phishers this time around were several pages on the GAC wiki, which is about as interesting as it sounds (ie, not very). ICANN said the only non-public information that was viewed was a “members-only index page”.
User accounts on the ICANN blog and its Whois information portal were also accessed, but apparently no damage was caused.
In summary, the hackers seem to have stolen quite a lot of information they could have easily obtained legitimately, along with some passwords that may allow them to cause further mischief if they can be decrypted.
It’s embarrassing for ICANN, of course, especially for the staff members gullible enough to fall for the attack.
While the phishers made their emails appear to come from ICANN’s own domain, presumably their victims would have had to click through to a web page with a non-ICANN domain in the address bar order to hand over their passwords.
That’s not the kind of practice you’d expect from the people tasked with running the domain name industry.

9 Comments Tagged: czds, gac, hacking, ICANN, phishing, security

Hotly contested gTLDs up for auction tomorrow

ICANN’s fifth set of last-resort new gTLD auctions is set for tomorrow and it’s another small batch.
Just two contention sets — .baby and .mls — are set to be resolved, with ICANN stashing the winning bids into its special fund.
.baby is hotly contested with no fewer than six applicants — five portfolio applicants and one big brand.
Will Johnson & Johnson get what was once a single-registrant “closed generic”, or will Donuts, Google, Radix, Famous Four or Minds & Machines prevail?
Meanwhile, .mls (for “multiple listing service”, a type of real estate listings aggregation service popular in North America) is a two-horse race between Afilias and the Canadian Real Estate Association.
I’m tempted to call this one for CREA. The organization is so desperate for the .mls gTLD that it filed two applications, one “community” and one vanilla.
The community application was withdrawn earlier this year when CREA scored 11 out of 16 points on its Community Priority Evaluation, failing to pass the 14-point threshold.
The organization even filed a Legal Rights Objection against Afilias in attempt to kill off the competition, which also failed.
Having fought off these challenges, Afilias is either going to get the gTLD or walk away empty-handed. The last resort auction does not compensate unsuccessful bidders for their investments.

1 Comment Tagged: .baby, .mls, afilias, auction, canadian real estate associated, ICANN, last resort, new gTLDs

As .trust opens for sunrise, Artemis dumps .secure bid

Amazon is now the proud owner of the .secure new gTLD, after much smaller competing applicant Artemis Internet withdrew its bid.
Coincidentally, the settlement of the contention set came just yesterday, the day before Artemis took its .trust — which I’ve described as a “backup plan” — to sunrise.
I assume .secure was settled with a private deal. I’ve long suspected Artemis — affiliated with data escrow provider NCC Group — had its work cut out to win an auction against Amazon.
It’s a shame, in a way. Artemis was one of the few new gTLD applicants that had actually sketched out plans for something quite technologically innovative.
Artemis’ .secure was to be a “trust mark” for a high-priced managed security service. It wasn’t really about selling domain names in volume at all.
The company had done a fair bit of outreach work, too. As long ago as July 2013, around 30 companies had expressed their interest in signing up as anchor tenants.
But, after ICANN gave Amazon a get-out-of-jail-free card by allowing it to amend its “closed generic” gTLD applications, it looked increasingly unlikely Artemis would wind up owning the gTLD it was essentially already pre-selling.
In February this year, it emerged that it had acquired the rights to .trust from Deutsche Post, which had applied for the gTLD unopposed.
This Plan B was realized today when .trust began its contractually mandated sunrise period.
Don’t expect many brands to apply for their names during sunrise, however — .trust’s standard registration policies are going to make cybersquatting non-existent.
Not only will .trust registrants have their identities manually vetted, but there’s also a hefty set of security standards — 123 pages (pdf) of them at the current count — that registrants will have to abide by on an ongoing basis in order to keep their names.
As for Amazon, its .secure application, as amended, is just as vague as all of its other former bids for closed, single-registrant generic strings (to the point where I often wonder if they’re basically still just closed generics).
It’s planning to deploy a small number of names to start with, managed by its own intellectually property department. After that, its application all gets a bit hand-wavey.

4 Comments Tagged: .secure, amazon, artemis, ICANN, ncc group, new gTLDs, security, trust

Last resort gTLD auction loser wants share of $5m winning bid

An unsuccessful new gTLD applicant wants ICANN to share the proceeds of its “last resort” auction with itself and the other losing applicants.
Aesthetics Practitioners Advisory Network had applied for .salon, but found itself in a contention set with three other applicants and was ultimately beaten at auction by a winning bid of over $5 million from Donuts.
Now, the company has written to ICANN to ask for the money from the ICANN-run auction to be shared out among the losing bidders in much the same way as it is when a contention set goes to private auction.
APAN CEO Tina Viney wrote (pdf):

On the basis that ICANN received such a large amount ($5.175million) for the bidding of this auction it would be fair and equitable for the losing parties to be considered in the distribution of the winning financial bid. We believe that ICANN should review this consideration for losing parties who have had to incur numerous costs, not just the application fee, but also toward the preparation of documents so that we could meet with ICANN’s requirements. These include, but are not limited to registry fees, solicitor’s fees, financial services, not to mention the enormous amount of time that is required of an applicant in preparing for their application.
As a result, we respectfully request ICANN as part of their funds distribution policy to consider the applicants who did not win at the auction, BUT WERE SUCCESSFUL IN PASSING THE EVALUATION PROCESS.

She said that private auctions, which allow losing applicants to recoup some or all of their costs, should be mandatory when a majority of the applicants in a contention set want one.
In .salon’s case, one of the four applicants didn’t agree to a private auction, according to Viney. As Donuts is the enthusiastic pioneer of the private auction concept, that means the holdout was either DaySmart Software or L’Oreal.

Comment Tagged: .salon, Aesthetics Practitioners Advisory Network, auction, donuts, ICANN, last resort, new gTLDs

First live dot-brand switches back to .com

CITIC Group, which became the first company to dump .com for its new dot-brand gTLD, has switched back to .com.
CITIC, a massive Chinese conglomerate, switched from citic.com to limited.citic in September, but a DI commenter noticed that it’s now back to using citic.com.
Google searches for “citic” were returning the new gTLD as the top hit for the Citic Limited, now it’s back to citic.com.
The domain limited.citic is not currently resolving to a web site for me.
Other brands are still actively using their dot-brand gTLDs, but Citic was the only one I’m aware of that decided to replace its .com.

3 Comments Tagged: citic, dot-brands, new gTLDs

.ceo smartens up in new promo video

Struggling to find its tone?
PeopleBrowsr has done a full 180 in its attempts to market .ceo through online commercials.
In its latest video, the company has gone for a straightforward grey-hair-in-a-suit-addresses-camera concept.

It’s a far cry from its first attempt, published a year ago but now flagged as “private” on YouTube, which comprised PeopleBrowsr staffers dicking around the office in Donald Trump masks.
It also represents an evolution from the cartoony, but much more respectable, effort from February.
“The video was produced over many months – with feedback and collaboration from over 100 of our early adopter CEOs,” the company said.
Now, .ceo is being positioned as a “business card” for CEOs that enables social networking opportunities.
The gTLD, which went to general availability in March, currently has fewer than 1,800 domains in its zone file, though PeopleBrowsr pegs its number of registrations at “almost 2,000”.

4 Comments Tagged: ceo, peoplebrowsr

New .jobs contract based on new gTLD agreement

ICANN and Employ Media are set to sign a new contract for operation of the .jobs registry which is based heavily on the Registry Agreement signed by all new gTLD registries.
.jobs was delegated in 2005 and its first 10-year RA is due for renewal in May 2015.
Because Employ Media, like all gTLD registries, has a presumption of renewal clause in its contract, ICANN has published the proposed new version of its RA for public comment.
It’s basically the new gTLD RA, albeit substantially modified to reflect the fact that .jobs is a “Sponsored TLD” — slightly different to a “Community” TLD under the current rules — and because .jobs has been around for nine years already.
That means it won’t have to sign a contract forcing it to run Sunrise or Trademark Claims periods, for example. It won’t have to come up with a Continued Operations Instrument — a financial arrangement to cover operating costs should the company go under — either.
Its commitments to its sponsor community remain, however.
ICANN said it conducted a compliance audit on Employ Media before agreeing to the renewal.
Employ Media remains the only gTLD registry to have been hit by a formal breach notice by ICANN Compliance. In 2011, it threatened to terminate its contract over a controversial proposal to all job aggregation sites to run on .jobs domains.
The registry filed an Independent Review Process complaint to challenge the ruling and ICANN eventually backed down in 2012.
The fight came about as a result of complaints from the .JOBS Charter Compliance Coalition, a group of jobs sites including Monster.com.

Comment Tagged: .jobs, .monster, compliance, employ media, ICANN, monster.com, registry agreement

.health backer has cop-like takedown powers for all gTLDs in Japan

LegitScript, a US company focused on eradicating illegal online pharmacies, which backs the .pharmacy and .health gTLDs, has been given police-like powers to have domain names taken down in Japan.
It has also emerged that when IP Mirror, a brand protection registrar, was hit with an embarrassing ICANN contract-breach notice in November, it was as a result of a LegitScript complaint.
Under section 3.18.2 of ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars must have a 24/7 abuse hotline that can be used by “law enforcement, consumer protection, quasi-governmental or other similar authorities” to report illegal activity.
Registrars must act on complaints made to the hotline within 24 hours, but only authorities designated by national governments get to use it.
Now, it transpires that LegitScript has been formally designated a 3.18.2 authority by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
That means the US company’s complaints about domains hosting potentially illegal pharmacy sites have the same weight as complaints from the Japanese police, when made to registrars that have an office in Japan, even if they’re headquartered elsewhere.
IP Mirror, which was recently acquired by CSC Digital Brand Services, is based in Singapore but has an office in Tokyo.
As far as I can tell, most of the top 10 registrars do not have offices in Japan. KeyDrive (Moniker, Key-Systems etc) may be the exception. GMO is the largest registrar based in Japan.
LegitScript announced its relationship with the Japanese ministry in September (I missed it at the time) and company president John Horton provided some context to the IP Mirror breach notice on CircleID today.
I only report the deal today because it strikes me as noteworthy that a private enterprise has been given the same powers under the 2013 RAA as law enforcement and government consumer protection agencies — and it’s not even in its home territory.
Horton told DI today that while LegitScript is legally based in the US and has offices in the EU, only Japan has so far formally granted it 3.18.2 powers. He said in an email:

We only have formal Section 3.18.2 designation in Japan at present. We have some other endorsements or recommendations by or on behalf of government authorities, although they do not specifically reference Section 3.18.2. We work closely with the Italian Medicines Agency and the Irish Medicines Board, for example, and report rogue Internet pharmacies in consultation with them.

Horton pointed out that anybody is able to to file abuse complaints under the 2013 RAA — and registrars are obliged to “take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately”.
His CircleID piece cites two instances in which such complaints from LegitScript resulted in ICANN breach notices.
The chief difference is that under 3.18.2 registrars do not have much flexibility in their response times. They have to “take necessary and appropriate actions” within a black-and-white 24-hour deadline.

1 Comment Tagged: .health, .pharmacy, 2013 raa, csc, ICANN, ip mirror, japan, legitscript, pharmacies

.love won by class action lawyers

It appears that the contested new gTLD .love has been won by the law firm Merchant Law Group, after an auction.
Minds + Machines, Richemont, Google and Donuts have all officially withdrawn their competing applications. I gather that withdrawals from Uniregistry and Famous Four Media are on their way.
.love would be MLG’s first successful new gTLD application.
The would-be portfolio applicant applied for eight strings, all of which were contested by others. It has withdrawn bids for .news, .club and .law after auctions.
MLG is odd as new gTLD applicants go. It’s a Canadian law firm that offers services across many areas of law but seems to specialize in class action lawsuits.
According to its application, .love will be positioned in the same space as .wed and .wedding:

.LOVE’s target markets are broad enough to maintain a financially viable TLD and distinct enough that the .LOVE TLD will not become ‘just another .info’. A .LOVE TLD will provide a unique space on the Internet for information and services related to the idea of love, engagements, marriage, and family. It will allow anyone to register a domain name and post information about products and services related to the idea of love, an engagement, a marriage, or family.

It is anticipated to be an open, unrestricted gTLD running on a CentralNic back-end.

1 Comment Tagged: .love, auctions, ICANN, merchant law group, new gTLDs, withdrawals