DK Hostmaster changes the registration of domains
According to a feature on Danish national broadcaster DR1, ordinary Danes are registered as the owners of fake netshops with the Danish domain name registrar DK Hostmaster.
As it is today, the person who is named as owner, when a domain is registered, receives a follow-up physical letter for orientation purposes only, but no extra confirmation is necessary.
This, however, is not good enough, according to IT expert Henrik Bjørner. There is a need for extra validation, Bjørner says, in order to make sure that those who register a domain name are who they say they are.
DK Hostmaster has acknowledged that there is a problem with the current system. Even though the system has previously struck the right balance, there has increasingly been issues with the system, thus necessitating a change. DK Hostmaster is now looking into making a system that require Danes who register a domain name to use their personal national eID signature, NemID, to register a .dk domain.
This, however, will not affect non-Danes registering a .dk domain name, as there is no comparable way to validate the identity of international users. The existing process of sending out physical mail to all domain name registrants even goes a step further than what is being done by most other registrars worldwide. Therefore, DK Hostmaster is going to introduce some sort of risk assessment when accepting registrations of .dk domain names by non-Danish residents.
The planned actions will be implemented before the end of 2017, although DK Hostmaster stresses that this is an uphill battle that can’t be won outright even with the introduction of these actions. This, however, does not mean that they won’t continue to try.