Calls for ICANN to approve a banking top level domain to reduce phishing

[mandy]

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...

full article: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03...ng_domain/

[jezebel]

It wouldn't eliminate phishing because the real URL could be hidden like so: SafeBank.safe

[mandy]

F-Secure explains why a .bank TLD would work:

New top-level domain will not solve the phishing problem once and for all, so it's not even worth considering.

This is not a silver bullet. A new top-level-domain (TLD) would not be the end of the phishing problem. But it would be a helpful top-level domain and it would stop a particular subset of phishing completely.

But .com works just fine!
Today, anybody can get a .com domain with a fake name and fake address, with a fake credit card. That's just fine with everybody? Don't we really need a TLD where you could actually trust that you know who owns the domain?


Phishers could still create realistic-looking fake domains. For example a look-a-like for www.citi.bank could be www.citi.bank.account.yadayada.com.
Yes, phishers would still be able to do this; this new top-level-domain would not be able to do anything to stop this problem. Same thing with masked html links.

full article: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/...l#00001195