How to account and value a domain name?

The domain name is an integral intangible asset© The domain name has this unique particularity to be an intangible asset with four dimensions. It is simultaneously: An IT object allowing to access services on the Internet by doing the link between the IP address (a suite of numbers) of a physical object and a literal name (role of the Domain Name Server or DNS);A communication tool allowing to establish its identity on the Internet and gain a digital territory;A legal element through... Read More

.AU domain names soon available for registration

Image source: kitkatty007 via Pixabay Until now, Australian domain names were only available for registrations in second level extensions, in particular .COM.AU. If the decision to open the .AU registration goes back to 2015, it took four years to set the rules! It seems that starting October 1st, 2019, the holder of the existing .com.au domain name, for example forexample.com.au, will be able to apply for priority status to register the exact match of their existing name in .AU, forex... Read More

Does the GDPR negatively affect enforcement efforts?

Image source: mohamed_hassan via Pixabay The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has without a doubt a negative impact on the enforcement efforts, according to the participants at the INTA 2019 annual meeting (International Trademark Association) in Boston. Margaret Lia Milam, domain name strategy and management lead at Facebook warned that the platform’s scale makes it a “huge target for bad actors”. Milam stated that because the site is working at such a scale, it cannot turn t... Read More

Voice.com domain name sold for $30 million

Voice.com website Block.one (EOS), the startup behind the EOS cryptocurrency acquires the voice.com domain name for the amount of $30 million. This is how the Chief Marketing Officer of MicroStrategy explains this acquiring at a high price: “Block.one has made a smart strategic decision in choosing Voice.com to be the internet domain name for its new social media platform. The word “voice” is simple and universally understood. It’s also ubiquitous ― as a search term . An ultra-premium do... Read More

NBA: Phishing doesn’t spare sports institutions

Image source: mohamed_hassan via Pixabay On last May 10th, in a press release, the Pacers Sports & Entertainment (PSE) organization, owner of the NBA’s basketball team the Indiana Pacers, revealed that they were the victim of a sophisticated phishing attack at the end of 2018. For reminder, phishing is a technique used to obtain personal information in order to commit an identity theft.  This is a «social engineering» technique, i.e. consisting in exploiting not an IT flaw but a ... Read More

The Nameshield SSL interface has had a complete makeover

More user-friendly, more comprehensive, more attractive… our brand new and improved Nameshield SSL interface is being launched on Thursday, June 13th allowing you to manage all of your certificates. You will now have access to key metrics on your certificate portfolio, to different certificate lookup views (such as complete portfolio, detailed overview, certificates nearing expiry, pending orders, expired or revoked certificates), to an Organization and Contact management tool and... Read More

Europe decides to apply sanctions to transboundary cybercriminals

Image source: GregMontani via Pixabay On Friday May 17th, 2019, the Council of Ministers of the European Union presented the creation of a blacklist identifying the perpetrators of cybercrimes located outside the EU. Thus this is a new legal context which has been validated by the EU in order to try to reduce the continuously growing cyberattacks’ number. Now, the EU will indeed be able to sanction individuals or entities involved in the cyberattacks carried out from outside the EU. Eu... Read More

Cyberattack: G7 and France organize a cyberattack simulation in the finance industry

Image source : TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay Faced with the upsurge and the continually increasing strength of cyberattacks, a simulation exercise of a cyberattack in the finance industry will be organized by the members of the G7, the world’s major economic powers. In the French presidency context, France will be the one that will run this test in which 24 financial authorities of the 7 members of the G7 will participate during 3 days. Today it is no secret that the banking sector is o... Read More

The Black swan time?

Image source: abudrian via Pixabay The actors and utility providers invade the connected world, benefiting from the innovations that the rest of the world opportunely provides them. It wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t live in an age where hacking a power plant became possible. In 2015 and 2016, hackers shut down power to thousands of users in the middle of the Ukrainian winter. Since then, the American government openly admitted that foreign powers tried every day to take control of the... Read More

Russia – Vladimir Putin signs the « Sovereign Internet » bill into law

Image source: essuera via Pixabay In a previous article of Lucie Loos dated of the 21st of last February, the study by the Duma, the lower Chamber of the Russian Parliament, of a draft legislation with the aim to create a “sovereign Internet” in Russia was mentioned. With this law, the country would be able to function in total independence if Russia was cut from the major global servers, by creating Russia’s internal DNS system, which would ensure the link between web address and IP address... Read More