Domain abuse is a serious matter, and we treat it as such. In real life, no one wants to experience robbery or theft, and the fear of losing your phone to somebody that could have access to your personal data is a real one. On the Internet, this applies just as much. We all want to feel safe in all the places we visit, whether they are public or private, and whether they are real or virtual. Therefore, it is a priority for us to help the internet stay safe for everyone and handle domain abuse in a fast and adequate manner.
Whichever form of domain abuse you may experience, we have made it easy for you to report it. We want to be able to offer you adequate and fast solutions for your problems. Before we take a look at how we handle abuse at Openprovider, it is good to learn a bit more about different types of domain abuse that you may encoutner. Below, we will review them one by one.
What is domain abuse?
ICANN created the Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) System to identify and track different types of domain abuse. In their system, they distinguish between four different kinds of security threats:
- Phishing: Domain names that support web pages that masquerade as a trustworthy entity. These could include entities like banks, known brands, e-commerce or government agencies.
- Malware: Domain names that facilitate hosting and/or spreading hostile or intrusive software that is installed on end systems, potentially without consent of the end-user.
- Botnet command-and-control: Domain names used to identify hosts that control botnets, collections of malware-infected computers. These can be used to perpetrate different abusive activities, such as spam email or phishing campaigns, for example.
- Spam: Domains that are advertised in unsolicited bulk email or used to name spam mail exchange systems.
How does Openprovider deal with domain abuse?
We’re happy to sell domains, but we’re also critical when the domains we sell are related to abusive behavior. When we get reports about possible abusive behavior, we will provide the tools and information necessary to take immediate action. We also strive to reduce the risks of it happening again. We provide a very clear form through which you can report abuse. Information from this form also continuously helps us to improve the way we handle abuse and reduces the time for handling abuse complaints.
What is Openprovider doing to help fight abuse?
As part of our roadmap, we have established three important goals in the area of domain abuse:
- Learning more about the identity of our customers: We’re developing tools to learn more about the identity of our customers. By learning more about the identity of our customers, we will be able to predict abusive behavior.
- Fraud prevention: Rather than simply optimising the way we currently handle abuse, we are building a new, technologically advanced solution that will help to prevent abuse in the future. Most companies in the industry focus on pushing fraudulent domains away. We also do that, but we are not satisfied with doing just that. These fraudulent companies just move to another provider and continue their illegal business there. We are building a solution that will prevent fraud or, if it does occur, detects it immediately. We hope the domain industry will adopt this solution to fight fraudulent behavior and hopefully ban it completely. It is an ambitious goal, but we are seeing better and better results. We are definitely on the right path. At the same time, we are building close relationships with local police and justice departments to help them fight internet crime.
- Abuse handling: By learning more about our customers and their behavior through machine learning, we will be able to automate the detection of possible abuse threats and establish protocols to prevent it from happening.
A few words from our CEO
In the words of our CEO, Arno Vis: “At Openprovider we grow businesses and improve people’s lives with the best innovative technologies. This promise fully extends over all our operations and process, and this promise therefore takes precedence in the evolution of how we deal with domain abuse cases.
As one of our values says:“be a wolf, not a sheep”. In terms of domain abuse, we don ‘t just want to be the fastest provider detecting abuse. We want to be the one to prevent it. As a provider, we are compliant with the process and the laws applied in every country separately. We take responsibility for doing our part, following up on regulations, asking for accountability to our customers, and executing action when the process allows us to do so.”
I’ve been scammed. Now, what should I do?
If you face any of the abuse situations mentioend above, please fill out our abuse form on our support page. After filing your report, you’ll receive an email regarding the situation of the abused domain.
We will inform both the reseller and the complainer about the complaint through sending an automated email that arrives 30 minutes after the complaint has been placed. In this email, we will inform the reseller about the complaint, the abusive domain, and the type of abuse. With this information, they can take immediate action. The domain will be automatically parked in the hour following the creation of the complaint.
Most abuse complaints are processed automatically, although we also process abuse manually when needed. We have defined criteria that help us to build a trust score system for resellers, in order to act quickly with those who match these criteria. This way, we have reduced the time in which we respond to abuse complaints. What we can guarantee you is that we will not leave any complaint unattended, and we will respond as fast as possible.
Last but not least, we ask you to please also report abuse cases to your local authorities. Involving authorities will help in defining local processes establishing joint protocols together with governments and public administrations. This will help governments to define better penalties for this type of crime. And that will help us to become better in our fight against abuse.
If you want to know more about our abuse management process, you can find further information in our Knowledge Base.
Help us fight abuse and make the internet a safe space for everybody by filling our abuse complaints form. This is how you help us learn more about scammers to be able to predict and prevent abuse in the future.
