How the second largest retail registrar handles abuse.
Last month, I spoke with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss about DNS abuse in episode 359. Today, Namecheap COO Hillan Klein comes on the show to talk about his company’s approach to the challenge. Klein shocked me by saying that Namecheap employs over 120 people to tackle abuse. He explains the company’s philosophy about privacy as it relates to alleged abuse, and what Namecheap has done to clean up problems that manifested last year when the pandemic upended its previous abuse management process. You’ll also learn about at least one clever approach the ‘bad guys’ take to slow down enforcement.
Also: Meta, Versign earnings, UDRPs, and a stolen domain lawsuit is dismissed
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I have lodged many takedown requests and domain suspensions to NameCheap’s abuse team. They are good to work with, and do eventually remove cases of abuse. It often requires an escalation and a follow up, which probably talks to the volume of cases that they deal with on a daily basis.
The process NC is going through is very recognizable.
A few years ago, we were at the same point, and though we did not have abuse issues that large, we did invest heavily into tooling, etc.
Thanks to our dashboarding, where every reseller has their DNS abuse dashboard, we are now in a situation where we can provide awareness around DNS Abuse, ie you know who blocklisted your domain name.
Furthermore, due to the leverage of 75+ RBLs, we can now pinpoint where DNS abuse occurs within the DNS.
The moment you get control back, you enter a situation where you no longer put out fires all day and can do deep-dive investigations in not-so-obvious cases of DNS abuse.
Like cyber terrorism, cyber mercenaries meddling with elections, ransomware attacks, and so on.