Patent describes way to track unusual registration activity.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 11,190,479 (pdf) to Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for “Detection of aberrant domain registration and resolution patterns.”
The patent describes a system that checks for anomalies in domain name registrations and resolution.
On the registration side, it could track metrics such as:
- New registrations per registrar or registrar family
- New registrations per registrant’s country
- New registrations per domain length
- Average number of vowels for new registrations
- Average number of consonants for new registrations
- Deleted names per registrar or registrar family
- Number of occurrences of a character in new registrations
and then check instances in which the data change beyond certain bounds. This could be used to track promotions, malware registrations, etc.
Verisign claims the idea could also be applied to DNS resolution to check for anomalies that might indicate a DDoS attack.
I would imagine that most large registries have some sort of anomaly detection built into their tracking dashboards.
Verisign applied for the patent on May 23, 2017, and it was granted today.
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