Nominet, best known as the .uk ccTLD registry operator, has
spread its wings to North America, opening an office in Washington D.C. But the
new office isnât to sell its registry services, but to sell their security
services.
Announcing their office opening, Nominet tout themselves as
a âsecurity specialist enabling threat monitoring and detection, prevention and
analytics at the DNS level, today made its official launch into the North
American market.â
This security service âsupports organisations wanting deeper
visibility and the ability to pinpoint threats through massive data noise, and
stop them instantly. The new capabilities are differentiated from competitive
offerings that donât operate at the DNS level, with deep inspection technology
uniquely suited to identify and block threats such as targeted malware,
ransomware, phishing, Zero Days, APTs, and data exfiltration attempts.â
Nominet has been diversifying in recent years. From its
origins as the .uk country code top level domain registry, itâs now using that
expertise to provide registry services to the .wales and .cymru new generic top
level domains, which together have 20,260 registrations, as well as backend
registry services for another 34 new gTLDs making them the fifth largest by
domains under management with 1.873 million domain names and eighth largest by
new gTLDs with 36. And now Nominet is using its expertise on the security
front, providing security services to companies that want them. Theyâre one of
a number of TLD registries diversifying and providing their expertise to both other
registries and other sectors. Some examples are DENIC, SIDN, nic.at and CIRA.
âWe feel like a new company despite a 22-year history in
infrastructure security, and weâre excited to enter the North American market
with a distinctive and proven set of skills and offerings,â said Russell
Haworth, CEO of Nominet. âWeâre proud of our expertise and experience in
critical infrastructureâin 2017 alone, Nominet analysed over 3TB of data across
the U.K. public sector and blocked 2.5 million malicious requestsâand we look
forward to working with U.S. organisations to enhance their security strategies
and implementations.â
In announcing their new office, Nominet promote their new
security service, Nominet NTX, by saying:
Whilst enterprises typically have numerous security layers, Nominet operates at a vital nexus: All networks rely on DNS traffic, which makes it a critical source of information for specific threats to the network. This area often gets overlooked in the security stack. Meanwhile, leveraging its long experience analysing data for threats, Nominetâs security researchers can identify malicious domains even before they register on standard threat feeds.
There is certainly broad-scale awareness of this critical issue: In a new study conducted by Nominet in partnership with Osterman Research, CISOs at over 30 large enterprises, a full 97% of respondents, say they see the value in monitoring, threat detection, attack blocking and analytics at the DNS level to enhance security; the few others didnât know or were unsure. The fact is, many large organisations are, or believe they are, monitoring at that level already, yet the reality is less definitive: Even enterprises with significant resources dedicated to security may lack the technologies needed to analyse billions of DNS data packets in real time, as optimal to identify todayâs threats.