The XXX Domain Controversy: Was it all a Waste of Time?

by titanadmin | Aug 26, 2015 | Spam News |

In 1998, ICANN issued the first domain names and IP addresses. There were not many top level domains (TLDs) to choose from. Each country had its own domain suffix, but the choice was limited to .com, .org, .net, .edu, .mil and .gov. Over the years, a few more options have been introduced such as .me, .mobi, .tv and .biz, but the suffix that has caused the most controversy is .xxx – a TLD intended for websites containing images of a sexual nature.

The .xxx TLD was seen as a method of introducing a red light district to the Internet, cleaning it up aside from a dirty corner that could be policed and easily blocked. Some purveyors of pornography allegedly welcomed the move, while others were opposed to it.

There were protests, but the new TLD was released in December 2011, and ICM Registry – a Fort Lauderdale for-profit business – was assigned responsibility for allocating the TLDs. Incidentally, the contract for this was quite lucrative. ICM Registry expected to make in the region of $200 million per year out of the deal.

Sometimes a good idea on paper doesn’t always work out so well in practice. For instance, some companies had spent a long time building up a brand name. They operated their domain on the .com domain, had bought up the .net, .mobi, .org versions and all other TLDs to protect their brand. They did not like the idea of having to do that again with the XXX version, and neither would they be willing to move their main site over to the .xxx TLD.

Few were in favor of the new XXX TLD

Pornographers were not the only objectors to the introduction of the .xxx TLD. The Bush Administration was opposed to the release. In fact ICANN was asked to withdraw support for the proposal. Criticism of the proposal mounted and ICANN came under a considerable amount of pressure. The American Department of Commerce, that has power over ICANN, received over 6,000 complaints about the introduction of the .xxx TLD. Even politicians who had originally backed the idea in the year 2000 changed their mind a decade later. Naturally, conservative groups also applied pressure to block the proposal. It was not enough. The TLD was released – with a delay of a month – and a swathe of new porn websites were subsequently launched.

Unsurprisingly, there has not been a reduction in the number of .com porn websites on the Internet. The new domain has seen even more created. Go figure!

ICANN was subsequently sued on the grounds that it had created a monopoly and that the introduction of the TLD forced businesses to spend even more money registering domain names to protect their brands from being piggybacked. After a couple of years, the lawsuit was dropped.

Controls put in place to protect trademarks

ICM regulators created the new TLD in order to clean up the Internet apparently. The .xxx TLD was seen as a way to make it easier for people wanting to view pornography to find it (it wasn’t exactly difficult, it must be said – type “porn” into a search engine for example) and as a way of promoting a responsible attitude toward it. It would, in theory at least, eventually lead to a dedicated area where pornographic websites could be housed.

However, trademark and patent protection advocate Inventa pointed out that opposition to the new .xxx TLD was virtually universal. No one wanted it apart from ICANN (and ICM Registry).

As for the fears that domain-sitters and entrepreneurs would take advantage, there were controls to prevent this. Eligibility criteria needed to be met. A company owning the trademarked .com version of a website could purchase the corresponding .xxx TLD to use as an adult domain or to prevent others from using it. Amazon.xxx, for example, could only be bought by Amazon.com. The ICM Registry reserved it for them. If there was no trademark, the domain name could be bought by anyone.

Was it worth all the effort?

ICM Registry would be inclined to agree, but as for making the Internet a safer place for children, cleaning up some porn, and having a dedicated online red light district, that clearly hasn’t worked. The biggest names in Internet porn still use their dotcom websites and have not made the switch to XXX domains. People interested in viewing pornography do not need an .xxx TLD to be able to find it, and don’t care what the name of the website is let alone the TLD, provided it gives them what they are looking for.

It is no easier to block pornographic websites than it was before the release. Simply blocking access to XXX suffixed websites will make no discernable difference to the amount of porn that is viewable online.

Until laws are passed to force porn websites to use the XXX domain – which would be incredibly difficult to implement – the move has not been particularly effective.

The only way to block effectively access block pornography from being displayed is to use a web filter such as SpamTitan Technologies. By using real-time classification, URL filtering, blocklists, keyword filters and other tools, SpamTitan Technologies web filtering solutions prevent the websites from being viewable. Something very important for schools, universities, colleges, charities, and corporations.

Any organization believing written policies on allowable uses of the Internet are sufficient to stop inappropriate use, should bear in mind that surveys have revealed that 20% of men and 13% of women have admitted to downloading pornographic content while at work. A recent pool of 500 Human Resources professionals indicated two thirds had discovered pornographic content on work computers, and the majority of porn is viewed during office hours (between 9am and 5pm).

If you want to stop employees accessing pornography in the workplace, the only effective way of doing so is with a robust web filtering solution.

Anonymous Accusations of Fake Malware Denied by Kaspersky Labs

by titanadmin | Aug 18, 2015 | Spam News |

Former employees of Kaspersky Labs have tipped off the media to an alleged practice of faking malware. It is claimed the company used fake malware to get rival anti-virus companies to flag the programs as malicious, potentially tarnishing their reputations with numerous fake positives.

For obvious reasons, the tip-offs have come from anonymous individuals who claim to have worked for Kaspersky Labs, yet their identities naturally cannot be verified. They could in fact be employees of rival anti-virus companies. It is therefore difficult to determine whether there is any truth in the allegations. Kaspersky Labs denied the allegations, in fact Eugene Kaspersky has been quite vocal on social media and has spoken out on Twitter, vehemently denying the accusations.

In an effort to find out more, we contacted Kaspersky Labs to find out further details. We received a reply as follows:

Kaspersky Denies Fake Malware Claims

“Contrary to allegations made in a Reuters news story, Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal.” Kaspersky went on to say, “Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false. As a member of the security community, we share our threat intelligence data and IOCs on advanced threat actors with other vendors, and we also receive and analyze threat data provided by others. Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat data exchange is a critical part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and we fight hard to help ensure that this exchange is not compromised or corrupted.”

Interestingly though, there does appear to be a grain of truth in the accusations, with the anti-virus software giant confirming that harmless malware was in fact created and uploaded. However, this was part of a test of its own software systems, not an attempt to discredit rivals. The statement issued explained the experiment:

“In 2010, we conducted a one-time experiment uploading only 20 samples of non-malicious files to the VirusTotal multi-scanner, which would not cause false positives as these files were absolutely clean, useless and harmless. After the experiment, we made it public and provided all the samples used to the media so they could test it for themselves. We conducted the experiment to draw the security community’s attention to the problem of insufficiency of multi-scanner based detection when files are blocked only because other vendors detected them as being malicious, without actual examination of the file activity (behavior).” The story was reported at the time in the media.

Kaspersky also explained that “After that experiment, we had a discussion with the antivirus industry regarding this issue and understood we were in agreement on all major points.” Further information on cascading false positives can be found here.

“In 2012, Kaspersky Labs was among the affected companies impacted by an unknown source uploading bad files to VirusTotal, which led to a number of incidents with false-positive detections. To resolve this issue, in October 2013, during the VB Conference in Berlin, there was a private meeting between leading antivirus vendors to exchange the information about the incidents, work out the motives behind this attack and develop an action plan. It is still unclear who was behind this campaign.”

False positives are common in the internet security industry. What is not known, and probably never will be, is who creates the bad samples that lead to false positives. As Ronan Kavanagh, CEO at TitanHQ, points out,“Kaspersky is an excellent product, we have never had an issue with it, quite the opposite in fact. Of course we have seen false positives, we were targeted by bad samples as were many other security vendors but we would have no visibility on who carried out these attacks.  The critical thing is that as an industry we work together in fighting back”.

Have you discovered false positives when you have run your software security programs?