Thousands Of British Internet Domains Suspended

Nominet, the organisation responsible for security of the UK Internet infrastructure has recently published its update on UK domains that have been suspended because of criminal activity over the 12 months to October 2019. 

• 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.
• Over 1,600 newly registered domains were flagged as potential breaches, but no suspensions were made, indicating a high number of false positives. 
• 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.