ICANN or ICANT: Is WHOIS an Enabler of Cybercrime?
- Authors: Watters, Paul , Herps, Aaron , Layton, Robert , McCombie, Stephen
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Proceedings - 4th Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop, CTC 2013 p. 44-49
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: WHOIS acts as a registry for organisations or individuals who 'own' or take responsibility for domains. For any registry to be functional, its integrity needs to be assured. Unfortunately, WHOIS data does not appear to meet basic integrity requirements in many cases, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement and rightsholders in requesting takedowns for phishing kits, zombie hosts that are part of a botnet, or infringing content. In this paper, we illustrate the problem using a case study from trademark protection, where investigators attempt to trace fake goods being advertised on Facebook. The results indicate that ICANN needs to at least introduce minimum verification standards for WHOIS records vis-Ã -vis integrity, and optimally, develop a system for rapid takedowns in the event that a domain is being misused.
Measuring Surveillance in Online Advertising: A Big Data Approach
- Authors: Herps, Aaron , Watters, Paul , Pineda-Villavicencio, Guillermo
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Proceedings - 4th Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop, CTC 2013 p. 30-35
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: There is an increasing public and policy awareness that tracking cookies are being used to support behavioral advertising, but the extent to which tracking is occurring is not clear. The extent of tracking could have implications for the enforceability of legislative responses to the sharing of personal data, including the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). In this paper, we develop a methodology for determining the prevalence of tracking cookies, and report the results for a sample of the 50 most visited sites by Australians. We find that the use of tracking cookies is endemic, but that distinct clusters of tracking can be identified across categories including search, pornography and social networking. The implications of the work in relation to privacy are discussed.