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Botnets beware: Nominet cleans up UK domains
With a little help from the academics...

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Thursday 26 April 2007

The dot-uk domain name registry has teamed up with university security experts to shield UK web users from abuse.

Nominet - which administers dot-uk domain names - is collaborating with Oxford Brookes University to find methods to identify abuse of the domain name system (DNS) and registration data stored on its 'Whois' directory.

The university will provide Nominet with two researchers - working for half a day every fortnight - to lead the development of anti-abuse tech over the next two years.

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Jay Daley, director of IT at Nominet, told silicon.com one researcher will look into using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and the other will explore visualisation methods to find patterns of abuse within large data-sets.

The AI systems will focus on optimising algorithms to whiz through databases and pick out any suspect patterns while the visualisation technique could provide a way to see abuse as it happens through methods such as live animations of the databases.

Daley said: "What we will end up with is this [the anti-abuse technology] built into our automated systems as much as possible so that there will be live detection and response to threats by computer systems with minimal human detection."

Daley added the research will focus on finding widely distributed abuse - for example somebody trying to steal addresses from hundreds of thousands of computers using a botnet.