A researcher from security technology company F-Secure has called for a top-level domain to be created for banks, in a bid to help address the ever-increasing problem of internet banking fraud.
<p>In an article in Foreign Policy magazine, F-Secure's chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen, has argued that banks could benefit from moving from standard domains such as .com and .co.uk to a specially created domain such as .bank. This, he claims, would make it much more difficult for consumers to be misled by phishing scams linking to rogue websites set up with similar-looking names, which can easily be created by anyone, and for as little as $5.<br /><br />This approach has already been adopted by travel industry companies and museums, which have their own .travel and .museum domains, respectively, and debate has been raging for some time over whether porn sites should be made to adopt the .xxx suffix.<br /><br />The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for setting up top-level domains, could restrict who can sign up for .bank domains, and make it costly for those applying to set up websites using the new domain, Mr Hypponen said.<br /><br />The price for the domain wouldn’t be just a few dollars: It could be something like $50,000 – making it prohibitively expensive to most copycats, he wrote in the Foreign Policy article. Banks would love this. They would move their existing online banks under a more secure domain in no time.</p>