Experts On 28,937 .UK Domains Suspended For Criminal Activity In 2019

Responsible for running and keeping the .UK internet infrastructure secure, Nominet has today published its update on .UK domains suspended for criminal activity over the 12 months to October 2019. Nominet suspends domains following notification from the police or other law enforcement agencies that the domain is being used for criminal activity.

The statistics:

• The criminality report shows that the number of .UK domains suspended between 1 November 2018 and 31 October 2019 has seen a small reduction year on year at 28,937 – down from 32,813. This represents around 0.22% of the more than 13 million .UK domains currently registered.
• Nominet collaborates with ten reporting organisations and received requests from five of these. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) which processes and co-ordinates requests relating to IP infringements from nationwide sources is the main reporting agency with 28,606 requests, followed by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (178) and Trading Standards (90), Financial Conduct Authority (48) and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (31).
• The number of requests that didn’t result in a suspension was 16 – down from 114 in the previous year. Reasons for requests not resulting in suspension include the domain already being suspended due to a parallel process, the domain already being transferred on a court order, or the registrant modifying the website to become compliant following notification.
• The number of suspensions that were reversed was five. A suspension is reversed if the offending behaviour has stopped and the enforcing agency has since confirmed that the suspension can be lifted.
• The report also provides an update on domains suspended and blocked under Nominet’s proscribed terms policy, introduced in May 2014. Over 1, 600 newly registered domains were flagged as potential breaches, but no suspensions were made, indicating a high number of false positives. Over the same period there were 0 suspension requests from the Internet Watch Foundation on Child Sexual Abuse Images (CSAM) on .UK domains.
• For the same period, Domain Watch – Nominet’s anti-phishing initiative that suspends suspicious domains at the point of registration – saw 2,668 domains suspended. When identified as high risk of phishing, domains will not resolve in the DNS until extra diligence is conducted and we are satisfied that the registration does not pose a phishing risk. If a domain is suspended, the registrant will receive an email informing them what has happened, together with the next steps required if they feel the suspension was not correctly applied. Of these, 274 successfully passed our additional due diligence and completed the registration process.