Domain Name System abuse talk

Start date and time

Wednesday 15 May 2019

Location

University of Surrey, Guilford

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. During this presentation we will begin a journey, where we will explore DNS and all of the forms of domain squatting. Then we will focus on a specific type of domain squatting called “combosquatting,” in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We will discuss the results of the first large scale, empirical study of combosquatting where more than 468 billion DNS records, collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years, were used for the analysis.