Privacy Digest

ICANN urged to cut phishing trawl with banking domain: "

.Safe harbour

Security watchers are calling on net governance body ICANN to adopt a new top level domain name to be used exclusively by registered banks and financial organisations.

A .safe or .sure domain name would give consumers increased piece of mind that they are dealing with a legitimate financial institution while potentially making it easier to identify rogue sites.

If ICANN introduced a .safe domain (or .sure or .bank), which could only be used by registered financial institutions, it would allow security providers to create better software to protect the public, according to F-Secure.

The idea has been in existence for some time, but the massive rise in phishing attacks over recent months has renewed interest. According to figures from UK banking organisation APACS released earlier this month, online banking fraud losses in the UK alone came to £33.5m in 2006, up from £23.2m in 2005. This 44 per cent year-on-year increase was largely driven by an increase in phishing incidents, which went up from 1,713 in 2005 to 14,156 last year.

(Via The Register - Security.)