What’s your name, organisation and role?
Volker Greimann, Team Internet, Head of Policy and Compliance – Online
Where do you work and live?
I work and live in Saarland, Germany
What is your personal and Team Internet role in the DNS industry?
Team Internet is a registry, registrar, privacy service, backend service provider and a webhosting service provider.
Why do you think abuse is an important issue to work on? / Why should we care about abuse?
The trust of Internet users in a stable, secure and reliable operation of the Domain Name System (DNS) is the most basic precondition in the success of the DNS industry. Abuse of these DNS resources has the potential to erode that trust.
As the Internet continues to evolve and change, threat actors also evolve and modify their “business models”. It is therefore imperative that everyone providing services (services that could, if abused, affect the trust of users in the Internet) must remain informed about the latest trends. They must also think about what role they can play in the mitigation of abuse that is occurring on their platforms or is enabled by their services.
On the one hand, we recognise that abuse on the Internet is too lucrative for those actors involved in it to ever go away, and that our own efforts can only ever hope to mitigate abuse using our services and platforms, given that these efforts only rarely lead to a permanent stop to such activities. On the other hand, our efforts nevertheless play a crucial role in reducing the volumes of such abusive use and criminal activities.
By working and educating ourselves on the types of abuse that may occur on our own platforms, or on the platforms of our partners and competitors, we can jointly identify methodologies and processes to better deal with these kinds of activities. For this reason, sharing of knowledge across the industry and beyond is helpful.
The same applies to ensuring that each party in the Internet value chain can identify the entities best suited to dealing with any particular form of abuse. For example, complaints regarding content on a website or regarding abuse of a service are only rarely best addressed by a domain name registrar. These should be sent to the hosting provider or the provider of the service being abused directly, given that the registrar has no ability to mitigate such types of abuse.
What is Team Internet already doing to mitigate and combat (DNS) abuse?
We investigate all incoming reports of abusive use of domain names registered through our platform and use the information available to us to find similar, yet unreported domain names, and take preventative measures. We rely on third party sources such as block lists and reporting feeds for additional intel on potentially abusive registrations on our platforms.
We aggregate intel about abusive registrations across our platforms.
We resolve incoming tickets by urgency, taking into account the types of abuse, their potential for damages caused to Internet users, and the likelihood of the abusive action that will still be ongoing.
Why did you join the topDNS initiative, and why should others follow?
Team Internet joined the topDNS initiative with the goal of creating a venue for discussion for the DNS industry and beyond to exchange information and best practices for combating abuse and raising awareness of the challenges we face when dealing with alleged and/or actual abuse. We are not experts on all forms of abuse, and we therefore rely on such shared information to remain alert to new methodologies used by threat actors to circumvent our processes and preventative measures. At ICANN, the scope of any cooperation is usually limited to registries and registrars. Our hope is that topDNS will expand beyond these parties and enable discussion and joint action by all service providers on the Internet.
What do you think is topDNS’s biggest achievement so far, and what do you expect from topDNS in the future / in 2024?
topDNS has brought various players in the DNS industry and beyond together and has provided a venue for discussion and uncomplicated sharing of knowledge on abuse trends and best practices. For 2024 and beyond, I expect this to grow into an initiative that surpasses the DNS industry and provides all those capable of taking action against abuse with the tools and information needed to take more effective action against abuse. By bringing more groups to the table, everyone can benefit from information on threat actors that go beyond any individual participant.
If you could fix one thing about the Internet, what would it be?
What is even more problematic than abuse is the fact that the Internet enables misinformation and division, even hate. If I had a magic wand to fix the Internet, I would turn it back into the tool that it was originally envisioned to be – something that brings people together instead of separating them, that clearly flags misinformation and propaganda, and that works for the betterment of mankind and open distribution of knowledge and information.