28 Abuse Prevention and Mitigation

Prototypical answer:

As previously stated, The Weather Channel does not plan to open .weatherchannel to commercial registrations at the second level. However, commensurate with TWCʹs enterprise-wide focus on data security, The Weather Channel and its registry services provider, Neustar, will carefully monitor back-end registry service systems in order to prevent fraudulent or abusive activity in the TLD.

As a media company, The Weather Channel is responsible and careful with dissemination of information that is impactful on human life and commerce. TWC is accredited by TRUSTe data protection and security services, and makes its privacy statement readily available to all users, a portion of which is included below:

Keeping the information you provide to The Weather Channel secure is important to us. We have put in place appropriate physical, electronic and managerial procedures designed to protect and safeguard your data. Of course, although The Weather Channel uses standard industry practices to protect your personally identifiable information, we cannot guarantee that your communications with our site will never be unlawfully intercepted, or that your personally identifiable information will never be unlawfully accessed by third parties.

The company accepts critique of its information and systems at http:⁄⁄feedback.weather.com⁄knowledgebase.This information consists of, at a minimum, a valid e-mail address dedicated to the handling of malicious conduct complaints, and a telephone number and mailing address for the primary contact. The company will continue to make this avenue available to its customers, end users, and others.

MEASURES FOR REMOVAL OF ORPHAN GLUE RECORDS

As the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN (SSAC) rightly acknowledges, although orphaned glue records may be used for abusive or malicious purposes, the dominant use of orphaned glue supports the correct and ordinary operation of the DNS. See http:⁄⁄www.icann.org⁄en⁄committees⁄security⁄sac048.pdf.

While orphan glue often support correct and ordinary operation of the DNS, The Weather Channel and Neustar understand that such glue records can be used maliciously to point to name servers that host domains used in illegal phishing, bot-nets, malware, and other abusive behaviors. Problems occur when the parent domain of the glue record is deleted but its children glue records still remain in DNS. Therefore, when the registry has written evidence of actual abuse of orphaned glue, it will take action to remove those records from the zone to mitigate such malicious conduct.

Neustar runs a daily audit of entries in its DNS systems and compares those with its provisioning system. This serves as an umbrella protection to make sure that items in the DNS zone are valid. Any DNS record that shows up in the DNS zone but not in the provisioning system will be flagged for investigation and removed if necessary. This daily DNS audit serves to not only prevent orphaned hosts but also other records that should not be in the zone.

In addition, if either The Weather Channel or Neustar become aware of actual abuse on orphaned glue after receiving written notification by a third party through its Abuse Contact or through its customer support, such glue records will be removed from the zone.

RESOURCING PLANS
Responsibility for abuse mitigation rests with a variety of functional groups. The Abuse Monitoring team is primarily responsible for providing analysis and conducting investigations of reports of abuse. The customer service team also plays an important role in assisting with the investigations, responded to customers, and notifying registrars of abusive domains. Finally, the Policy⁄Legal team is responsible for developing the relevant policies and procedures.

The necessary resources will be pulled from the pool of available resources described in detail in the response to Question 31.The following resources are available from those teams:
Customer Support - 12 employees
Policy⁄Legal - 2 employees

The resources are more than adequate to support the abuse mitigation procedures of the .weatherchannel registry.

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