The latest fraudulent email scam poses as the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, or FDIC. The emails appear to come from fdic.gov email addresses like alert@fdic.gov, insurance@fdic.gov and accounts@fdic.gov, and claim to have important news regarding recipients’ banks. It then includes bogus links to find out more details, which could lead to sites that collect users’ personal information or download malicious software onto their computers.
 
Like most banks, the FDIC does not send unsolicited emails to either consumers or business account holders. Users should be aware of this fact and should not click on any of the links in these phony emails.
 
The FDIC issued a warning about these emails on its website at fdic.gov. These fraudulent emails are an example of one of the oldest phishing schemes in the book, and users need to be aware of these tricks inorder to protect themselves.

A recent article in People’s Daily Online describes the rapid decrease in domain name registrations in .CN, the country code TLD for China (under which there are over 30 second-level extensions) over the past year. The amount of registered .CN domains has fallen from 13.7 million to just over 6 million in the year that has passed since China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology imposed new regulations to govern .CN registrations.

On Friday, the Financial Times published an article exploring the role that governments have been assuming in cyber security. At one point while discussing the relationship between the U.S. government and ICANN, the article makes the somewhat misleading assertion that “American control over the administration of the web is slipping.” In reality, since ICANN signed the Affirmation of Commitments (AOC) in September 2009, the U.S. maintains virtually no control over the organization.

Earlier this month, ICANN opened public comment period on a proposed amendment to offer domain names consisting solely of numbers, and of numbers and hyphens under the .NAME gTLD. These types of domains were initially reserved by Global Name Registry (GNR) when .NAME first launched in 2001.