Making it easy for cybercriminals

In American Greatness, Ned Ryun writes,

...Unfortunately, cyber criminals have found their equivalent of the easily found hide-a-key, and it’s the .US country domain code. While most websites that service users in the United States use the .com suffix, .US domains are growing in prominence and likely to increase as most popular .com domains are registered. The .US domain is administered by the Department of Commerce, which has clear rules designed to ensure that all addresses ending in .US are reserved for Americans.

But to say it’s being administered is a stretch: clearly someone inside the department has decided we will just have open borders—both online and offline.

Consider these facts: All .US internet domain addresses are required to be hosted in the United States, yet there are nearly 100,000 domain names ending in .US that are hosted outside our borders, with more than 30,000 hosted in China. What’s more, all .US internet domain addresses are required to be registered by U.S. businesses, organizations, or individuals. A survey of WHOIS indicates that at least 50,000 names belong to Chinese registrants, nearly 15,000 are registered to Russian registrants, and even some Iranians have been allowed to register .US names.

Either someone at the Department of Commerce is asleep at the wheel or this is intentional mismanagement. In addition to these facts, all internet web addresses ending in .US are required to be reviewed and cancelled if they have spam, phishing, or other abuses. But according to surbl.org, .US addresses are by far the most abused country code domain names in the world, with nearly 20,000 .US domain names associated with spam.

The safety and the well being of Americans should be the first and foremost priority of our government. Apparently the rules and regulations as laid out by the Department of Commerce are more a series of suggestions with little to no enforcement. It’s time for greater oversight and enforcement, not only to uphold the rule of law, but also to protect the American people who fund the various departments and agencies.

Read more here.