Impeding Criminal Activity Online
The .uk naming authority, Nominet, has published its latest update regarding the numbers of domain names in the .uk space that have been suspended for criminal activity in the last year. Nominet’s criminality report shows that over 22,000 .uk domain names were suspended following requests by law enforcement agencies since November 2019.
Requests came from The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), which processes and co-ordinates appeals relating to intellectual property infringements from nationwide sources, such as the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and Trading Standards.
The report also showed that Nominet’s anti-phishing initiative, which suspends suspicious .uk domains at the point of registration, saw over 5,000 domains suspended. These figures are almost double the total number of suspensions from last year, which reflects our observations that phishing is an ever-increasing problem.
In response to the pandemic, Nominet increased the number checks in regards to new domain registrations to mitigate fraudulent activity relating to COVID-19. By October 2020, Nominet had placed 3,811 domains associated with COVID-19 on hold at the point of registration pending further registrant checks.
Nominet’s success is part of an industry-wide effort to reduce pandemic-related crime, and we continue to support our clients with complimentary watching to seek out and prevent COVID-19 scams and criminality.
Nominet’s report validates our view that Corporate Domain Name Management goes together with proactively protecting your domain name portfolio. It is critical that businesses with an online presence monitors the infringement landscape and takes prompt and effective action against third party domain names.
Creating a hostile online environment for criminals is a necessary element of any brand protection strategy.
Our Client-Shaped Domain Name Monitoring service uses per-brand algorithms and learning to detect infringements that affect your brands in any domain space at any time. Our clients then rely on our twenty-year pedigree of successfully formulating strategies to take down and recover infringing domain names, impeding the criminals that target our clients’ brands.
For a no-obligation demonstration of our domain name monitoring service or to discuss our enforcement services, please do get in touch.