Plug pulled on dodgy registrar?

2008-11-01

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

ICANN plans to terminate accreditation of registrar favoured by cyber crooks.

ICANN, the organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, has announced its intention to pull the plug on Estonian domain registrar EstDomains – long known to be favoured by cybercriminals for their domain registrations.

In an official letter dated 28 October, ICANN advised EstDomains that the official ICANN Registration Accreditation Agreement with the company would be terminated on 12 November 2008, citing company president Vladimir Tsastsin’s conviction of credit card fraud, money laundering and document forgery as the reason for the termination. However, a response from EstDomains has since been received by ICANN, advising the organization that Tsastsin resigned from his post prior to his conviction and has since been replaced – thus appealing to ICANN to reconsider the termination of the agreement. ICANN has put the termination process on hold while it investigates.

Experts estimate that tens of thousands of malicious domains have been registered through EstDomains including sites used in drive-by-downloads, botnet command-and-control servers, spammed domains and so on.

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