The .COUNTRY registry increases its prices as of September 27, 2023

The .COUNTRY registry increases its prices as of September 27, 2023

The .COUNTRY registry will significantly increase the price for new registrations under this extension from September 27, 2023, 16:00:00 UTC.

All registrations, transfers and renewals of a .COUNTRY domain name registered after September 27, 2023 will be subject to a price increase of 100 times the current price.

This very significant price increase, which has not been explained by the registry, will only apply to domain names registered after this date.

Domain names registered before September 27 can still be renewed at the current price, and will not be affected by the price change.

To protect your brands without being impacted by this price increase, we invite you to register your .COUNTRY domain names as of now.

The Nameshield team is at your disposal for any questions.

Image source : internetnaming.co

ICANN76, Sally Costerton, the new interim president of ICANN, makes her mark

Candidate in March 2020 and then in March 2021, the city of Cancun finally had to wait until March 2023 and the end of the COVID pandemic to see a new edition of an ICANN summit in person. 2023, a very important year for the organisation. It will indeed celebrate its 25 years of existence while it is going through a risky period with an interim presidency after the resignation of its former President on 22 December 2022.

ICANN76, Sally Costerton, the new interim president of ICANN, makes her mark

Two women at the head of ICANN

Sally Costerton from the UK, who has been Vice President of Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) in charge of stakeholder engagement and awareness of ICANN and its mission worldwide since 2012, has been appointed interim Chief Executive Officer of ICANN following the departure of Goran Marby at the end of 2022. She is supported by Tripti Sinha who serves as ICANN’s Board Chair. Tripti is also Associate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the University of Maryland, in the Information Technology Division. This is the first time ICANN has had two women leaders. However, the situation echoes the creation of ICANN. As it was recalled at the opening ceremony, in 1998, when the US government gave ICANN the task of managing the DNS addressing system, a woman also held the position of Chair of the Board. This was Esther Dyson.

While leadership interims are rare at ICANN, this situation led to the organisation of a special session called “The Future of ICANN and the Next President and CEO”. A session where participants would have expected to interact with the new Board. This was not the case, as this session was like a kind of open mic without a direct interlocutor to express expectations towards the new Management of the organisation.

An interim presidency for a governance organisation also means a risky period, especially as there is no shortage of issues to address and the geopolitical context is tending towards increased fragmentation. However, although we do not know how long the interim presidency will last, Sally Costerton quickly made her mark at the start of the summit, when she declared, among other things, “I do not know everything, but I can rely on experts“. These words were reassuring and showed a pragmatic approach.

Transparency tested by experience

ICANN is a well-established organisation, as it has been holding summits for 25 years. The trend in recent years has been for the Supporting Organisations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) that make up the organisation to move towards greater transparency by opening up almost all their sessions to the participants. The most significant transformation has been in the GAC, the body representing governments, whose sessions were closed for many years before being fully open to all participants. This is an opportunity to salute the work of Manal Ismail, who after nearly six years at the head of the GAC is leaving her place to the Paraguayan Nicolas Caballero. A global tendency, therefore, of a nature to generate confidence, a key value to respond to the more and more numerous detractors of the ICANN governance mode.

But this tendency was reversed during this summit because many sessions were closed, “Closed sessions” to which even some affiliated participants could not have access neither in face-to-face nor in remote. Some of the participants were very upset and did not fail to point this out during the traditional Public Forum which usually closes the week of meetings.

Progress at a forced march?

The consensual approach, typical of ICANN, is both a strength for federating players around new obligations that are adopted, but also a weakness because it considerably slows down the progress of important work.

A striking example is the DNS abuse. Malicious use is indeed a real problem given the damage suffered by the affected Internet users. The GAC did not fail to recall this once again during a session where external experts were invited, such as a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. The latter indicated that in the United States, in 2022, more than 800,000 domain names were the subject of complaints causing losses of more than 10 billion US dollars. While the topic of DNS abuse has been a recurring theme at every ICANN summit over the years, it is clear that the consensus has shown its limits. Stakeholders in the GNSO, the generic name policy body, have never been able to agree on a way forward, whether it be a Policy Development Process or contract negotiations to revise stakeholder contracts with ICANN. After recent consultations with stakeholders, the GNSO finally decided on the second option, and the least we can say is that at ICANN76, the will was to reach a result quickly. An amendment to the registry and registrar contracts is being drafted and is expected to be presented in June and voted on by the parties concerned in October.  

The GNSO intends to build on the momentum of another contract amendment being voted on by stakeholders: an “RDAP” amendment. RDAP is an alternative protocol to Whois that provides access to domain names registration data. The outcome of the votes and thus the adoption of these contract revisions remained uncertain at the end of the ICANN summit as different thresholds of participation and favourable votes must be reached.

Partial adoption of recommendations for future rounds of new gTLDs

Another issue that some would like to see move forward more quickly is that of future rounds of new generic extensions. Indeed, the last window for applications for generic extensions dates back to January 2012. Since then, a policy development process has been conducted since 2015 to define a set of recommendations for the holding of new application windows. The Final report of this process was submitted to the ICANN Board in February 2021. In the autumn of 2021, ICANN surprised the community by announcing a scoping phase, an ODP (Operational Design Phase), which ultimately lasted until the beginning of this year. The board had not yet decided on the Final report of recommendations, a prerequisite to be able to start the implementation work of the recommendations. So the new interim president of ICANN was also very much expected on this subject.

And she quickly warned that the time was also for action on this subject: “You will see that things will be clarified” (editor’s note: on the next series of generic extensions), she declared during a session during the week. At the end of the week, at a Board meeting, 98 recommendations from the policy development process were adopted, with a further 38 put on hold as requiring further information. An implementation plan is also expected with a deadline set to 1st of August with a focus on internationalized domain names and extensions that ICANN organisation wants to focus on in future rounds and the need to clarify whether closed generic extensions will be offered.

Comments from NAMESHIELD

We can regret a return to a certain opacity in the decision making during ICANN76 where no less than 25 closed sessions were held. Nevertheless, this is perhaps where the progress made on subjects that were not progressing well came from, such as DNS abuse, a very important subject for NAMESHIELD, which offers several solutions to defend your online assets, and the holding of a forthcoming series of new generic extensions, where NAMESHIELD experts can also accompany you.

The other question was how the new interim ICANN President Sally Costerton, would handle her new role in a risky period for ICANN whose model is also increasingly challenged by States, international organisations and even technological alternatives. On this point, the new president appeared to be proactive, joining words to deeds, as on the subject of further series of new generic extensions. Sally Costerton seems to have already started to trace her way towards a full term CEO role for the organisation.

Image source : ICANN’s website

Nameshield is exhibitor at the Rethink! IT Security on 22-24 March 2023 in Berlin!

Phishing attacks are becoming more and more frequent and aggressive – learn from us how you can prevent your company’s email addresses from becoming the starting point of such attacks.

On 22.03. at the ICEBREAKER we will discuss the following topic: Domain names and DMARC – Current trends and challenges in IT security.

The Rethink! IT Security is the leading IT security summit for CISOs and IT security decision makers from the German-speaking region.

Learn about current challenges, technologies, trends and best practices in the field of IT and cybersecurity!

https://www.rethink-it-security.de/

As our customer we have a limited number of free tickets. Please contact us at salesgermany@nameshield.net.

We look forward to welcoming you at our stand and have prepared a little surprise for you there to help calm your nerves in case of an incident.

Nameshield renews its ISO 27001 certification on all its registrar activity

Nameshield renews its ISO 27001 certification

First French registrar certified ISO 27001 since 2017, for its activities of domain names portfolio, DNS and TLS/SSL certificates management, Nameshield is proud to announce the renewal of its ISO 27001 certification in February 2023.

What is the ISO 27001 certification?

ISO 27001 is an international standard that describes the requirements for the implementation of an Information Security Management System, intended to select the security measures to be implemented in order to ensure the protection of a company’s sensitive assets on a defined perimeter. In Nameshield’s case, this covers the entire registrar activity.

At a higher level, the ISO 27001 standard requires that the managers of the company are involved in the cyber defense. In parallel, a steering committee follows the implementation of the new measures respecting the standard.

Why the ISO 27001 certification?

To be ISO 27001 certified is to guarantee to our clients and partners that the security of information systems is fully integrated in each of the services offered by Nameshield, that we are committed to a process of continuous improvement, requiring specific resources that we have chosen to deploy.

The ISO 27001 certification also confirms the competence of Nameshield’s employees and their expertise in protecting critical information.

What this ISO 27001 certification guarantees

The ISO 27001 certification, delivered by LRQA, the World Leader of the certification of value added Management systems, ensures:

  • The involvement of all Nameshield’s employees in the continuous improvement of our security arrangements;
  • An answer to our security goals and those of our clients through an annual analysis of the risks and their processing, according to the Ebios method;
  • The deployment of more secure products and services, with higher added values, that better meet our clients’ expectations;   
  • Our mobilization in case of incidents and our ability to always do better by analyzing the processing of each alert;
  • The continuity of our activities, whatever the threats, by ensuring our remote activities (backup site, telecommuting, redundant servers…).

The renewal of this ISO 27001 certification confirms Nameshield’s determination to offer the best services to its clients under conditions of optimal security.

New document: 5 minutes to understand Phishing as a Service (PhaaS)

5 minutes to understand Phishing as a Service (PhaaS)

Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) is a fast-growing phenomenon in the cyberthreats world, getting armed with tools that make it more and more prosperous.

It has opened up the online fraud market to the masses, to the point that phishing attempts have become a daily plague.

Find in this new “5 minutes to understand” document, available for download on the Nameshield’s website, how phishing is now sold in ready-to-use kit and how to protect against it.

Download

Afnic Registrar Day is back

Afnic Registrar Day

On January 10, the new edition of Registrar Day was held, organized by AFNIC, the registry of the .FR extension, this event is mainly intended for registrars.

While the event was usually held in December, this new edition, which was both accessible in person and remotely, and which took place after the pandemic period, was held at the beginning of this year, a way to place ourselves “in a new dynamic,” according to Pierre Bonis, AFNIC’s Director General.

The Registrar Day was an opportunity to review the highlights of the year 2022 for the organization, the most notable being the deployment of a new registry system on October 1 and the renewal by the French government of the .FR management concession for a new 5-year period. This renewal is accompanied by the implementation of new commitments such as access to registration data for authorized authorities or a strengthening of the fight against domain abuse.

In terms of figures, it should be noted that in 2022, .FR passed the 4 million mark in volume of domain names, a faster growth than the median rate of 2.0% recorded by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) for the year 2022 at the level of European ccTLDs. It is worth noting that .FR ranks third in terms of volume among the ccTLDs of the European Union, behind .DE (Germany) with some 17 million domains and .NL (Netherlands) with more than 6 million domains, and is tied for 7th place with .AU (Australia) at the global level among the 308 ccTLDs delegated to the root 1  

1 Source Verisign

Image source : Afnic’s website

The .FR counts today 4 million domain names

Managed by AFNIC (acronym for Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération – French Association for Cooperative Internet Naming, the French Network Information Center), the favorite extension of the French people has reached 4 million registered domain names!

Every week, between 12,000 and 16,000 new .FR domain names are registered. The .FR has become a reference domain, with a market share in France of nearly 40%, which has been growing for several years, particularly thanks to the digital transformation of French VSEs/SMEs. Thus, more than 50% of them have chosen a .FR domain name for their website.

Easy to register and inexpensive, this extension is synonym of trust and recognized for its reliability, with 87% of French people trusting it! For more information and to register your domain name in .FR, do not hesitate to contact a Nameshield consultant.

Image source : site de l’AFNIC

Nameshield will be present at the FIC North America – On November the 1st and 2nd 2022 in Montreal

Nameshield will be present at the FIC North America - On November the 1st and 2nd 2022 in Montreal

The International Cybersecurity Forum, has become in its 15 years of existence, the largest cybersecurity and digital trust event in Europe, with 19,000 participants, 550 private and public sponsors, 520 speakers and 60 countries represented. With the support of the Canadian and French authorities, the event is crossing the Atlantic and will take place in Montreal, Canada, on November the 1st and 2nd, for its first North American edition.

The FIC North America aims to bring together the cybersecurity and digital trust communities on both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the major challenges our digital societies are facing.

Meet us at the event.

Meet our experts and discover our global solutions that answer to the requirements of DNS security and the need to monitor, protect and defend your brands online.

For more information and to register, please visit the event’s website: https://america.forum-fic.com/

ICANN75, a dense summit before the ITU plenipotentiary meeting

Barely three months after the ICANN74 summit in The Hague, the one in Kuala Lumpur, 75th edition, has just been held. A second summit in hybrid mode, a mix of face-to-face and remote that claims almost 2000 participants from 112 countries, 60% of which were present on the spot. As if to better exist, two weeks before the particularly important appointment of a new secretary general at the head of the International Telecommunication Union, the technical counterpart of ICANN, ICANN proposed a dense summit. NAMESHIELD looks back over.

The sensitive appointment of a new general secretary at the head of the ITU

During the traditional opening ceremony of the ICANN75 summit, Goran Marby, the current head of the organization said “ICANN must be able to continue its mission for a single Internet“. This remark was referring to concerns about the upcoming appointment of a new general secretary to head the ITU, the UN agency in charge of regulating and planning telecommunications worldwide. After two mandates, the current secretary, the Chinese Houlin Zhao, will indeed give up his place to one of the two candidates in the running to succeed him: Doreen BOGDAN-MARTIN, an American or Rashid ISMAILOV, a Russian. Two candidates and two different visions of governance models as Goran Marby indicates: “One of the candidates wants the transfer of competences from the IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards) and ICANN to the UN“. During another question and answer session with the ICANN Board, the election was again invited in the exchanges since it was question of the increased risks of fragmentation of the DNS and the unique identifiers system if the ICANN missions are entrusted to the States. Later in the week, during a cross session between the ICANN Board and the GAC, the governmental body, the Russian representative of the GAC took advantage of a speech to answer in Russian to Goran Marby’s remarks, explaining that the Russian candidate at the head of the ITU does not want to dismantle the Internet. To better support his remarks he communicated the program of the candidate. Things calmed down at the end of ICANN75 during the traditional public forum, which we can regret that it lasted only one hour, a forum where once again the Russian representative of the GAC took the floor in English indicating that Russia is not against the Internet governance model and that it was necessary to take care to reflect the Russian position with accuracy.

The fragmentation of the ICANN model, a major concern

A sign that Internet fragmentation has become a major concern is that this topic was subject to a dedicated session. An interactive survey among the participants revealed that 53% of them consider that the Internet is already fragmented. The reasons mentioned are, on the one hand, the imbalance observed for access to the Internet from one continent to another, Africa being the least well endowed in this area. Other sources of fragmentation mentioned are the cost of subscriptions, which makes access impossible for the poorest, and the multiplication of laws at the state levels, which in some cases prevent full access to this resource, and in others prevent controlled access.

On the problems of connectivity in the world, Goran Marby emphasized the project “ICANN Ground”, a program under construction that will allow to solicit funds on specific needs. The endowment will come from the auctions of the new generic extensions round of 2012, some 233 million US dollars. Ukraine was the first state helped by ICANN with an emergency aid of 1 million US dollars made available in spring.

Is this good will enough to keep the unique Internet, totem of the organization? Indeed, apart from the political and societal fields, the technical alternatives, the so-called “alternative” roots, notably based on blockchain, have also been mentioned. These add new problems due to the lack of community and inter-community coordination with the DNS players. Name collisions indeed become inevitable.

So, to those who indicate that some actors are tempted to turn away from ICANN because of the length of the processes on the issues to be addressed, the organization answers that it is the price to pay for a community functioning by consensus. And on the subjects in debate, it is necessary to notice that there is no lack of them.

The period of amendments, the failure of the accuracy scoping team

As a sign that things are moving forward, the Registration Data Policy resulting from a revision of the Temporary Specification applied in response to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is entering its final stretch with implementation scheduled for early 2023. This policy will embed measures applied to registries and registrars on the collection, processing and storage of personal data related to domain names.

The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), which is used to publish domain name registration data in the same way as Whois, will be gradually replaced by Whois from next year, with a transitional phase of 18 months, provided that the majority of stakeholders approve the project during a forthcoming consultation. The idea of introducing additional measures in the contracts of the stakeholders to fight against DNS abuse is also gaining ground.

Other topics are still in development, such as the next round of new generic extensions, which we discuss below, and the Standardized System to Access Data (SSAD), which is intended to standardize access to registration data in the case of legitimate requests. A prototype will be developed over a period of 9 months.

But we could also note what has been described as the “failure” of the Accuracy Scoping Team, a working group that was supposed to evaluate the measures on the accuracy of domain name registration data and to identify the possible policy gaps. Indeed, due to the lack of a legal basis to access the data and thus assess the accuracy of the data, their mission could not be carried out. Their work is therefore stopped.  

A next series of new generic extensions under the impulse of internationalized extensions

The next series of new generic extensions, still in the framing phase, has been mentioned as a response to fragmentation thanks to internationalized extensions, extensions in native language, which allow, according to the words of Goran Marby, “to bring the Internet closer to its users“.  He hopes that the next series of new generic extensions will be “a real success from the point of view of internationalized extensions because the Internet is too often perceived as a Western instrument“. The ICANN Board also mentioned these internationalized extensions as a response to the accelerated concentration of the market because they can help “raise awareness of the need for a diversified ecosystem“. Internationalized extensions should benefit from a new spotlight with the launch next year of the first Universal Acceptance Day, on February 16. This event is intended to mobilize the technical community to take into account this type of extensions and domain names.

Comments from NAMESHIELD

We could fear that with the proximity of this summit with the previous one, hardly three months have passed since the ICANN74, this summit lacks substance because of the lack of time to progress on the debated subjects. In fact, the third and last annual ICANN meeting is usually held at the end of October. It is necessary to notice that ICANN75 has not lacked substance, either on the subjects that were discussed or on the particularly high number of sessions: 167 and things move forward. As some participants have indicated, we can regret a certain lack of interactivity with, for example, a Public forum shortened to one hour and sometimes a bit simplistic answers like Internationalized gTLDs to mitigate the concentration of our sector. On this subject, we can remind that NAMESHIELD is an independent French provider.

If the year 2022 has seen fragmentation become a central topic of ICANN summits, one may wonder if this extremely dense summit, anticipated compared to previous years, did not seek to be perceived as a marker of the usefulness of the ICANN organization in the face of current challenges, a summit placed just before the decisive election of the new General Secretary of the IUT. To the numerous animated sessions in the arcane of the ICANN now makes place the silence to follow this determining designation for the perpetuity of the organization or as to better hold its breath.

Nameshield will be present at the Brand Protection Congress – On October the 19th and 20th, 2022 in Nice

Nameshield will be present at the Brand Protection Congress

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has given cybercriminals the opportunity to take advantage of the situation to sell counterfeit products. Protecting the organization’s intellectual property and consumers’ trust is now more important than ever.

The Brand Protection Congress is a high-class brand protection event which aims to allow brand owners to discuss the industry challenges they are facing and their potential solutions.

This 7th edition will take place in Nice, at the Hotel Le Negresco, on October the 19th and 20th. The topics range from the various online anti-counterfeiting tools, the latest technological developments, the liability of intermediaries, and the various methods that brands have adopted to protect their rights.

Meet us at the event, booth n°8.

With nearly 30 years of experience in online brands protection, Nameshield assists brands in order to protect, monitor and defend their digital territories.

Nameshield has developed effective and relevant tools, associated with an expert consulting offer allowing brands to preserve their integrity and assert their rights.

Meet our experts and discover our full range of monitoring and services:

  • Domain names monitoring (new registrations / content / whois etc.)
  • Web and social networks monitoring
  • Trademark and domain names portfolio audit
  • Remediation solutions, recovery procedures and acquisition by our in-house legal department.

For more information and to register, please visit the event’s website: https://worldbigroup.com/7th-Brand-Protection/