The Freename Forum

US Senator Mark R. Warner, Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, wants to hold domain registrars more accountable in the fight against “fake news”. He threatened legal remedies in the event of failures.

At the beginning of September 2024, the US Department of Justice announced that it had foiled a foreign influence operation financially supported by the Russian government. Specifically, it involved the seizure of 32 domain names as part of the “Doppelganger” operation, which was used by the Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura) and ANO Dialog to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, strengthening pro-Russian policies and interests and influencing voters in US and foreign elections, including the 2024 US presidential election. According to the US Department of Justice, cybersquatting, invented influencers and fake profiles were used to secretly spread false narratives generated by AI on social media. It mentions the registration of domains such as fox-news.in, www.fox-news.top, washingtonpost.ltd or washingtonpost.pm (the latter as an imitation of the washingtonpost.com website) to publish news from the Russian government. Other targets of Russian propaganda included Germany, Mexico and Israel.

Democratic Senator Warner follows up on this action in an open letter addressed to the .com registry VeriSign and the five domain registrars NameCheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, NewFold Digital and NameSilo. He calls on the companies to take immediate action against the ongoing misuse of their services for covert foreign influence operations, especially in the period before and after the US election day on November 5, 2024. Investigations by the Facebook group Meta from 2023, to which Warner refers significantly, had made clear the extent to which the domain name industry had enabled and facilitated malicious Russian influence operations and, in particular, duplicate campaigns. For example, the companies had prevented a number of measures to combat illegal activities, such as withholding important registration information, ignoring inaccurate WHOIS data and failing to detect repeated cases of “intentional and malicious domain name squatting”. The abuse would have been detectable through a number of techniques, including the use of cryptocurrencies to pay registration fees, the intensive use of anonymization infrastructure (including the use of internet service providers associated with obfuscation network activity), the use of credit cards issued to a US company with significant ties to Russia, the use of fictitious registration data, and in at least one case the use of a Russian address.

Given the expected close outcome of the US presidential election, the population is particularly dependent on media organizations and state government websites to obtain reliable and accurate election information. It is therefore imperative to minimize the risk of foreign attackers spreading false narratives using false domains. Should the companies contacted fail to meet their obligations in future, Warner held out the prospect of new legislation: “Given the continued lapses of your industry to address these abuses, I believe Congress may need to evaluate legislative remedies that promote greater diligence across the global domain name ecosystem”.

The letter from Mark R. Warner can be found at:
https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_c ... etters.pdf