« ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC ) has issued an advisory on a process known as Domain Name Front Running. It is a practice of stealing someone’s domain name search queries and registering the domain name before the original person can register it. Let’s say you find a domain that is available for registration. If someone steals your idea and registers it before you, it is like holding you hostage and is called Domain Spying or Front Running. The SSAC was not able to find any hard evidence during their first inquiry so they are issuing the advisory for people to come forward with good hard evidence it is happening.
Much of the information presented before SSAC regarding domain name front running is anecdotal and incomplete. The information SSAC has reviewed allows us to observe that some part of the community believes monitoring practices that result in preemptive registration of domain names have occurred and that such practices are not acceptable. SSAC is concerned that, whether real or perceived, preemptive registration portrays an unfavorable image of the domain name industry. This Advisory is therefore a preliminary study and is intended to put the issue before the community for discussion and to solicit well-documented incidents, if any can be obtained.
There are several ways that spying could occur:
* Client software.
* 3rd Party WHOIS query portals.
* Unauthorized executables.
* DNS operators.
* Registrars (and resellers).
* Name Spinners.
* Registries
* Information leaks, social engineering.
Basically the SSAC is looking for hard evidence that this spying exists. If you can help with hard evidence, please contact them. I would encourage people to perform their whois query via our services as I can guarantee we are clean. We have also published ways that stealing can happen even if using our service. It is possible for spyware on your computer to steal your queries or even DNS queries at your own ISP. It is possible that a Registrar or Reseller is stealing your query. It is also possible that a Registry is leaking the information to Domain Tasters. Never type a domain name into a browser and see if a website exists. This is a horrible way to test if the domain exists because you are leaking the DNS query to global root servers and your ISP’s DNS servers. Major ISPs sell click stream data and non-existent domain name results.
As another side note. Our Bulk Check utility is not real-time. We run the results against a zonefile that could be up to 12 to 24 hours delayed. If you need a real-time query, please run it manually on our services. Domain Tasters are testing millions of domains a day that have been previously registered and that takes a lot of good names off the floor everyday. The only good news is that Domain Tasters generally throw back 99.9% of the domains within 5 days.
There will be a public forum next week at the LA ICANN meeting and I would encourage people to show up and speak out against Domain Tasting. I think Domain Tasting is causing a lot of damage to people, but it is hard to measure. People assume that names are being spied on while I find that the most common thing is Tasters that re-filter old domains over and over again. »
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