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CleanDNS Joins APWG, Leveraging Cybercrime Data Clearinghouse To ‘Directly Clean’ the DNS

DNS abuse manager CleanDNS joined the APWG this month as a sponsoring member of the global cybercrime data clearinghouse, leveraging the APWG members’ eCrime eXchange (eCX) data resources for development and support of its domain abuse monitoring and case management tool services.

CleanDNS acquires, archives and deploys reported data as evidence in documented cases to notify entities responsible for remediating the abuse to address promptly. Failure to address the abuse within a given timeframe can result in a client or server hold of the offending domain(s).

“Essentially, this data is being employed to directly clean up abuse in the DNS,” said Chad Los Schumacher, Chief Operations Officer at CleanDNS.

Supplemented by CleanDNS’s connections to industry experts, notifiers and reporters in government, law enforcement, academia and research circles, the CleanDNS dashboard provides relevant insight and evidence — along with an effective methodology of managing abuse detection, reporting, and mitigation.

“We are looking for any partners that provide quality evidenced abuse for malware, phishing, botnets, spam, fraud and compromised domains. They can integrate with our systems free of charge to help accelerate their notification process. We cover 400+ TLDs and ~30M+ domains,” Los Schumacher said.

APWG’s eCX has been the global non-profit-managed nexus for machine-event data related to cybercrime since 2004, starting out as an FTP service for members organizing against the then-nascent global conflict with cybercriminals. Today, the eCX, in its fifth revision, operates as an API platform providing upwards of one billion-plus data entities per month to APWG members worldwide.

CleanDNS was developed by a team of cyber security and investigative professionals who recognized the critical need for a systemized, standardized and customizable process to rein in domain name abuse and shorten the life cycle of domains used for abuse. The CleanDNS platform utilizes an evidence-based workflow that simplifies and accelerates domain abuse mitigation procedures. By facilitating early detection of abuse, CleanDNS assists with detecting likely sources of abuse with tools and processes to effectively mitigate.