Industry News Summary – Week 10

Recent domain name news from the last week:

Nominet consults on short .uk domain names

Nominet has announced a three-month consultation to decide how it should release one-letter, two-letter and single-number domains for registration.

The organisation, which owns the national registry for all .uk domain names ending .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk, is currently unable to offer the short domains owing to the rules set up at the organisation’s founding in 1996.

Nominet is now proposing to lift these restrictions as the technical and policy reasons for withholding these domains have ceased to be relevant.  Read full article here

How a missing full stop ends with a dot con

Cybersquatters are exploiting poor punctuation to send people to shady websites.

Although large corporations are accustomed to registering alternative spellings of their domain names, cybersquatters are now preying on people’s propensity to miss out full stops when typing web addresses, according to a report by domain management firm CSC Labs.

Removing the full stop between prefixes such as ‘www’ and the domain name was found to be a common missed variation, as well as removing the stop between the address and ‘com’.

In terms of distribution of malware, what we’ve found over the past few years is that hackers are using websites to host malware, whether these be malicious sites or legitimate sites.  Read full article here