The Guardians of Name Street: Studying the Defensive Registration Practices of the Fortune 500
Boladji Vinny Adjibi
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 3 · Phishing & Fraud 2
In the digital age, domain names serve as crucial interfaces between companies and their customers, facilitating access to services and establishing brand identity. However, this essential asset is constantly under threat from adversaries who exploit human error, hardware glitches, and confusing similarities to redirect users to malicious lookalike domains. While the strategies of these adversaries are well-documented, a significant knowledge gap persists regarding how companies, particularly large enterprises, proactively defend their digital presence through **defensive domain name registration**. This talk, presented by Boladji Vinny Adjibi at the NDSS Symposium, addresses this critical void by offering a comprehensive analysis of defensive registration practices among Fortune 500 companies.
AI review
Competent empirical research with a clear contribution — Fortune 500 defensive registration coverage is measurably poor and the brand protection industry is underperforming against a quantifiable metric. The 147M domain corpus, passive DNS grounding, and NDCG framing give this more rigor than the typical domain-abuse think-piece, but the novelty ceiling is low and the findings land where you'd expect them to.