New Zealand's CoVid-19 lockdown: a view from the DNS At InternetNZ, we guard the .nz namespace for all New Zealanders. As part of our role, we take care of managing the register for .nz domains, and also operate critical
.nz 7 little known facts about .nz You may already know that .nz is one of the most popular choices for New Zealanders to get themselves online, but the way we act online is changing everyday. There
Suspicious domains and how to find them Automatic close domain name variant detection using string similarities Phishing, as one of the most popular social engineering attacks, aims to obtain an Internet user’s personal information through a
Building and deploying classifiers with Airflow and Docker Classifying fake online stores within .nz InternetNZ is helping New Zealanders to harness the power of the Internet by ensuring that .nz is a safe place to do business. To
DNS DNS Flag day, the aftermath Back in October 2018 we blogged about the upcoming DNS Flag Day, and how it could potentially affect .nz domains. As InternetNZ regularly tested .nz domains for potential failure after
Airflow Improving data workflows with Airflow and PySpark Within the Technical Research team, we have developed many data workflows in a variety of projects. These workflows normally need to run on a schedule, contain multiple tasks to execute
Detecting resolvers at .nz This is a follow-up post to summarise the work of resolver detection presented at DNS-OARC 29. We built a classifier that can tell, with certain probability, if a source address
DNS DNS Flag day In this blog post, we introduce the upcoming "DNS Flag day", how it will affect .nz domains and how .nz compares to other ccTLDs.
Domain popularity across countries As the DNS operator of .nz, we manage 4 of the 7 .nz nameservers ourselves and we've been collecting their DNS traffic. The other 3 are hosted by overseas providers
DNS traffic analysis Source Address Classification - Clustering My previous post "Source Address Classification - Feature Engineering" introduced the background of the source address classification problem and a critical part of the work - generating the
Analysis of registrations from registrant point of view This is a follow-up post on registrant classification. Before reading this post, make sure to check out Registrant Classification using Machine Learning. In the last post, we introduced the models
.nz is joining fellow domain industry leaders at GDD Industry Summit I’m currently attending the ICANN organisation’s Global Domains Divison (GDD) Industry Summit being held in Vancouver, Canada. Arriving to warm weather, soaring mountains and water as the back
DNS traffic analysis Source Address Classification - Feature Engineering Problem background As we operate the authoritative name servers for the .nz ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain), we observe more than 500k unique source addresses sending DNS queries to
Registrant Classification using Machine Learning An important task in text data mining is text classification/categorisation. The objective, is to start with a training set of documents (e.g. newspaper articles) labeled with a class
Registrar Size Prediction An interesting request we received after the register size prediction presentation at the Registrar Conference earlier last year, was a suggestion of applying similar methodology on the data per registrar.
Scanning .nz for HTTPS support As part of our efforts to understand the .nz namespace better, we started at the beginning of 2017 to check domains for the presence of a secure website using HTTPS,
.nz DNS traffic: Trend and Anomalies As we run the .nz ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) authoritative nameservers, we receive lots of DNS queries and answer each query with a DNS response. We capture these
Register Size Prediction In my previous two posts, we've seen how to model domain retention prediction and new creates forecasting. Those are essential model components required for a register size prediction model. In
Resolver centricity experiment The Domain Name System is a distributed database with a hierarchical structure. A complete DNS resolution is a time-consuming process composed of iterations of network communications between the DNS resolver and the name server chain. Hence, caching has been introduced to speed up the
Domain Retention Prediction Customer-base analysis has become increasingly important. A critical part of the analysis is the prediction of retention rate, which is defined as the proportion of customers active at the end of period $t-1$ who are still active at the end of period $t$. Retention
Time Series Analysis of .nz Activity Data The number of new domain creations is an important indicator of the registry activity. Using an appropriate method to predict the number of creations in the future helps us to better understand registry behaviour and plan wisely. One of the most popular forecasting methods
Observations from 4 years in the domain name industry. So today marks my last day in the office as CMO for the .nz registry, NZRS. A bitter sweet day as a I reflect on my time here and prepare
Characterization of popular resolvers from .nz authoritative name servers' point of view As part of our role as .nz registry, we manage 4 out of 7 of the .nz authoritative name servers. We receive hundreds of millions of DNS queries from the
Domain Names The list of ALL 882 top level domain options Recently the European Domain Centre published a fantastic infographic that shows the explosion of new top level domain options that have and are being made available. You can view the
The Impact of .nz and .uk Registrations at the Second Level This interview was conducted with Tony Kirsch (Domain Name Association), Oliver Hope (Nominet) and David Morrison (NZRS). This interview was originally posted by the Domain Name Association With the recent rollout of new TLDs, the opportunity to create new, meaningful domains has presented a
