Boston, MA (PRWEB) June 21, 2010
KnujOn.com, LLC (knujon.com) has conducted a comprehensive audit of the Internet's domain name system as it pertains to Registrars accredited to by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Our findings are shocking and go a long way to explain the prevalence of cybercrime and spam. While the major focus of the report concerns policy failures, in most cases we connect this with illicit Internet drug traffic. Registrars are the companies that sell domain names and 162 of them may be violating their contracts to the ultimate benefit of widespread criminal networks. 80 Registrars are blocking their WHOIS access. Several Registrars have bad WHOIS for their own websites. The report may be found here: http://www.knujon.com/knujon_audit0610.pdf
Most troubling, one of the largest Registrars eNom (DemandMedia) may be knowingly facilitating the illicit traffic of rogue pharmaceuticals. eNom has been notified they are sponsoring fraudulent pharmacy networks and are in violation standards set by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. One network in particular is the GlavMed network, a criminal group that uses spam to advertise illicit sites. eNom pays in excess of half a million dollars per year to ICANN in fees alone and is by far one of the largest Registrars.
The report also demonstrates how some Registrars supply critical backbone services to illicit pharmacies, the back-end payment processing and network services required to keep the operations continuous and nearly undetectable.
Additionally there are a dozen or so terminated Registrars still selling gTLD and claiming ICANN accreditation, while over 100 current Registrars may not be real companies but rather phantom shells of other Registrars. Our audit also found Registrars denying services they are contracted to provide and failing to post polices and prices for the consumer. The simple answer is that the basic policy structure underlying the Internet has been compromised with impunity and the dark hand of drug trafficking is the benefactor and may even be the hidden influence. We are releasing this report to coincide with the start of the ICANN meeting in Brussels Belgium and plan to discuss it at length during the sessions. KnujOn is a small, independent Internet policy and security research group located in Boston and Vermont.