There were 35.93 million domain names registered within China as of the end of 2021, up more than 4.5 million in 12 months, from 31.36 million, according to the English version of the 49th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development published in April.
Afilias made the jaw dropping announcement to registrars this week that the .au wholesale, or registry fee, is being reduced by a whopping A$0.05 or 0.63%.
Cloudflare’s systems recently automatically detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack — one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record, the cybersecurity company announced in a blog post last week.
There were 174,903 new .eu domain name registrations in the first quarter of 2021 taking the overall total registrations in the European ccTLD to 3,724,513, according to EURid’s Q1 2022 Progress Report [pdf] released last week. Three countries led the way with Luxembourg showing an increase in registrations of 7.4% for the quarter, Portugal (4.5%) and Liechtenstein (2.8%).
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) recently launched .auCheck to help internet users check their website, email and internet connections for use of the latest and most secure internet standards. It’s aimed at .au domain names but appears to be able to check domain names in any top-level domain. And the .au policy and regulatory body, auDA, and registry, Afilias, don’t come out well.
Norwegian-based cybersecurity company IQ Global AS must be good. This week they announced one of their long-term customers, the Swedish Internet Foundation, operator of the Swedish ccTLD .se, has bought a stake in the company, believed to be around 20%.
DNS Abuse has become an issue the domain name industry is beginning to give the attention it deserves. In February 2021 attention to it was ramped up when the Public Interest Registry, the team behind .org, launched the DNS Abuse Institute. Prior to this the issue was bubbling along being discussed regularly at ICANN meetings and elsewhere.
A young girl singing “Let it Go” from Disney’s Frozen movie in a bomb shelter. A Ukrainian band in full combat gear offering to live-stream with pop star Ed Sheeran. And shots of civilians climbing on Russian tanks to brazenly wave the Ukrainian flag.
It’s not been a good week for auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body, and their backend registry provider Afilias. First on Tuesday there was a security incident that auDA claims saw “a small number of domains” disappear for half an hour. Then today with the launch of second level (or .au direct) registrations, there has been another stuff up that sees all new second level/direct registrations having to be manually entered after registration with no timeframe given for a resolution.
As the conflict in Ukraine escalates, expert cyber-watchers have been speculating about the kind of cyber-attacks that Russia might conduct. Will the Kremlin turn off Ukraine’s power grid, dismantle Ukraine’s transport system, cut off the water supply or target the health system? Or would cybercriminals operating from Russia, who could act as proxies for the Russian regime, conduct these activities?