Domain spoofing is a common form of phishing when a bad actor uses a domain to impersonate a company. They register a domain name that is confusingly similar to the legitimate one in order to trick the intended recipient.The launch of a new .au domain name space will up on 24 March 2022. The introduction of .au direct is the result of significant public consultation conducted in 2015, 2018 and 2019, and will bring Australia in line with many other country code Top Level Domains including the United Kingdom (.uk), Canada (.ca), the USA (.us) and New Zealand (.nz).
The .com.au domain name space is what we call a restricted domain namespace. Only online Australian entities with a current ABN or ACN, AU TM owners, and local residents can register a .com.au domain name. However, .au is more relaxed. They’re open to anyone with a verified connection to Australia who wants to create or manage an online presence for themselves or their organisation. This makes .au more open to abuse.
Brand Protection: Register your brandcom.au and brandnet.au domains
With the increased risk of domain abuse, it is important for Australian brands to consider all of the threats associated with the launch of .au.
An easy way to trick your customers is to register your brand with a “com” at the end. For example, brandsec’s core website is brandsec.com.au and our emails are sent from an @brandsec.com.au address. If a bad actor registered brandseccom.au and then sent emails from an @brandseccom.au address there is a risk that at first glance, our customers or suppliers could be tricked.
To address this issue, we are registering both brandseccom.au and brandsecnet.au domain names to deny potential bad actors from having access to domain names that could trick our customers.
We are also recommending that our customers register any confusingly similar domain names in the .au space that could be used to trick your customers given the relaxed registration requirements.
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About brandsec
brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that looks after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.