Microsoft released the Microsoft Country-Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) Registry Security Assessment Service at the RSA Conference today in San Francisco:
The new service was designed to help ccTLD registry operators find and fix security vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
The offical annoucment was made on technet.com.
“The exploitation of vulnerabilities specific to country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries has become an increasingly common problem, especially in relatively small markets around the world. ”
“A ccTLD is an internet domain registry generally used or reserved for a country, a sovereign state, or a dependent territory, such as .co.uk (for United Kingdom) or .fr (for France). This allows web sites to be associated with their specific country, territory or geographic location and it provides the foundation for internet experiences by ensuring people using the internet reach the services they expect. Today, over 300 country-code top-level domain name registries are responsible for servicing hundreds of millions of domain names worldwide.
Attacks on ccTLDs have far-reaching effects on private individuals, large and small companies, non-profits, and government organizations. Individuals attempting to reach certain web services may be redirected to inappropriate content where their computers can become infected by malware, putting their personal information at risk. Additionally, it is difficult for people to determine whether the problem is with the ccTLD or the organization that runs the service they are trying to reach. This often results in an erosion of confidence in online service providers when, in fact, they had nothing to do with the incident.
Today, at the information security RSA Conference in San Francisco, Scott Charney, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Trustworthy Computing, announced during his keynote the availability of our new Microsoft Country-Code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) Registry Security Assessment Service to help registry operators find and fix security vulnerabilities before they are exploited. The service is available now and is being made available at no charge to registry operators.
The Online Services Security and Compliance team (OSSC) that I lead is responsible for securing Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and data centers that host over 200 cloud services for more than one billion customers, over 20 million businesses and 76 markets worldwide. We are pleased to be able to provide this service to the greater online community and share many of the lessons we have experienced in our own environment.
Microsoft’s History of Support for Country-Code Top-Level Domain Registries
The OSSC team works closely with industry groups such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that manages market domain name registries.…
