[gnso-rpm-wg] Article on Combo-squatting study conducted by Georgia Instutute of Technology and Stony Brook University affecting our discussion of Trademark + Industry Terms in the TMCH, Sunrise and Claims (among other RPMs that it may also implicate)

[socata]

Dear WG members,


My name is Zhouheng, a Ph.d Candidate in Renmin University of China (RUC), majored in Intellectual Property Law. Before my research career in RUC, I used to become a policy  analyst in China Organizational Name Administration Center (CONAC), a domain name registry for ".政务" TLD.
        
For this article, I do agree with George Kirikos that the number in the article is lack of representativeness, it's hard to say the 268 marks is enough to evaluate the whole situations.


However, I hope to remind you guys, for some small enterprises, even the 300 dollar URS fee or 150 dollar TMCH fee is too high. They are lack of tools to detect the potential registration. For me, it's pretty hard to surf the right TMCH website, the trademarkclearinghouse.com doesn't belong to deloitte or ICANN. So the number of "bad" domains classified as "combosquatting" may not be 270 million, it will also cause some serious confusion.


As I am a new member to this WG, and this is my first emails in ICANN WG, If there is any inapporiate words in my email, please feel free to inform me. 
　
--
Zhou Heng
Ph.d Candidate
Renmin University of China




在 2017-11-16 23:28:59，icannlists <icannlists at winston.com> 写道：
http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/Blog/detail.aspx?g=cf4bc6c3-272f-4ccd-8555-59c97b932598
 
A few quotes from the article for those with less time:
 
·         “Combosquatting is a type of domain name squatting in which website addresses confusingly similar to well-known brands are deliberately registered, often with a view to committing fraudulent activity. Specifically, it involves the registration of a popular trademark combined with another phrase – for example, ‘brand-shop.com’.”
·         “Among the striking findings is that there were over 2.7 million combosquatting domains targeting the 268 most popular US trademarks – a prevalence over 100 times greater than typosquatting domains.” 
·         “The problem seems to be getting worse with the number of queries to these domains growing year-on-year, also in contrast with typosquatting sites.”
·         “This potential to more effectively dupe consumers has serious consequences for both internet users and brand owners. To date, combosquatting domains have been used for phishing, spamming, hacking, and affiliate abuse.”
 
Here is a link to the Full Study:  http://iisp.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/images/hiding_in_plain_sight-_a_longitudinal_study_of_combosquatting_abuse.pdf
 
Here is the Conclusion Section (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting a few phrases):
 
“In this paper, we study a type of domain squatting termed “combosquatting,” which has yet to be extensively studied by the security community. By registering domains that include popular trademarks (e.g., paypal-members[.]com), attackers are able to capitalize on a trademark’s recognition to perform social engineering, phishing, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even targeted attacks. We performed the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting using 468 billion DNS records from both active and passive DNS datasets, which were collected over an almost six year time period. Lexical analysis of combosquatting domains revealed that, while there is an almost infinite pool of potential combosquatting domains, most instances add only a single token to the original combosquatted domain. Furthermore, the chosen tokens were often specifically targeted to a particular business category. These results can help brands limit the potential search space for combosquatting domains. Additionally, our results show that most combosquatting domains were not remediated for extended periods of times—up to 1,000 days in many cases. Furthermore, many instances of combosquatting abuse were seen active significantly before they were discovered by public blacklists or malware feeds. Consequently, our findings suggests that current protections do not do a good job at addressing the threat of combosquatting. This is particularly concerning because our results also show that combosquatting is becoming more prevalent year over year. Lastly, we found numerous instances of combosquatting abuse in the real world by crawling 1.3 million combosquatting domains and manually analyzing the results. Based on our findings we discuss the role of different parties in the domain name ecosystem and how each party can help tackle the overall combosquatting problem. Ultimately, our results suggest that combosquatting is a real and growing threat, and the security community needs to develop better protections to defend against it.”
 
I’m asking Staff to enter this study into the record of this WG
 
Actual, growing problem identified and verified by external research: Let’s get down to business solving it by enhancing the RPMs to address it in order to protect end users of the Internet.  I don’t think we need to wait for the rest of the studies to come back to get underway.  It is laid out pretty plainly in the Georgia Tech Study.
 
Best,
Paul
 
 
 



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