[gnso-whois-wg] Whois WG Statement of Interest

["patrick cain" <pcain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1. Current occupation, employer and position.

I am a research fellow and evangelist with the APWG (www.antiphishing.org).
The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) is the global pan-industrial and law
enforcement association focused on eliminating the fraud and identity theft
that result from phishing, pharming and email spoofing of all types.

 The APWG acts as a clearinghouse for best-practices relating to deterring
online fraud and crime, and collects, aggregates, and distributes discovered
fraudulent domain and URL data to members, research partners, law
enforcement, and filtering and anti-virus vendors to prevent.

I also own a small network security consulting company using my multi-year
experiences as an ISP security officer to the benefit of my customers.


2. Type of work performed in 1 above.

My work involves technical interactions with the APWG's data repository,
blind contact system, and investigative partners. I am also part of the APWG
public education group that presents technical and statistical data to other
parties and public forums.
 

3. Financial ownership or management leadership of registries, registrars
or other firms that are interested parties in Whois. 

None.

4. Nature of your interest in Whois.

Our researchers maintain that fraudulent domains collect most of their
victims within the first four or five hours of operation. Our mission
includes identifying fraudulent domains to be included in browser and
mail-relay filter lists and working to get the fraudulent domain disabled as
quickly as possible to reduce the number of phishing victims. Fraudulent
contact data in a domain record makes this quite hard. Hiding domain and
contact data so it is harder to quickly identify suspicious URLs in a domain
just creates more victims and generates more false positives.