At the FIRST conference, James Pleger and William MacArthur from RiskIQ described a relatively new technique being used to create DNS domain names for use in phishing, spam, malware and other types of harmful Internet activity. Rather than registering their own domains, perpetrators obtain the usernames and passwords used by legitimate registrants to manage their own domains on registrars' web portals.

Nominet have now published their inital policy statement for the .cymru and .wales top level domains. Details, including the exact list of domain names that will be reserved, are still being discussed with the Welsh Government so anyone interested in registering a domain should keep an eye on the .wales/.cymru website where you can also register for updates.

The recent TF-CSIRT meeting in Zurich included a talk by the Swiss telecoms regulator (like ours, called Ofcom, though their 'F' stands for Federal!) on the law covering websites in the .ch domain that distribute malware, normally as the result of a compromise.

Nominet’s latest proposal to issue second level domain names directly under .uk is considerably simpler than its predecessor.

The Domain Name Service (DNS) which translates names to IP addresses (among many other things) is critical for humans using the Internet. Research by Slavko Gajin and Petar Bojovic presented at the TERENA Networking Conference indicates that mis-configurations are more common than we might hope. Getting DNS right often requires different organisations to have matching configurations: if my name server says that part of the name space is delegated to your name server then your name server needs to agree!