Internet addresses corresponding to recent bank mergers are already being hoarded and sold online.

In "cybersquatting", likely addresses are bought cheaply in the hope of selling to the businesses involved, or as a medium for advertising.

Domain names for the merged Bank of America/Merrill Lynch as well as for Lloyds TSB/HBOS have been snapped up.

In one case, the domain name has already been listed on eBay, with the site directing visitors to the auction.

As reports of Lehman Brothers' intent to sell itself first surfaced last Friday, cybersquatters had already spotted Barclays, HSBC and Bank of America as potential buyers.

Accordingly, barclayslehman.com, hsbclehman.com, hsbclehmanbrothers.com and bofalehman.com had been acquired.

With the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America this week, cybersquatters registered bankofamericamerrilllynch.com and bofaml.com.

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The websites of two of the net's most critical oversight organizations were hijacked by Turkish hackers who sent visitors to rogue pages that challenged the overseers' authority.

Some of the official domains for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) were temporarily under the control of a group that calls itself NetDevilz, according to zone-h, which tracks hijackings of individual websites. Specific domains that were hijacked included "icann.com," "icann.net," "iana.com" and "iana-servers.com."

People who tried to visit the sites were greeted with a message that read: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

This may have come as something of a shock to the principals of IANA and ICANN, which have authority over some of the most the net's most critical functions. IP address allocation, management of the domain name system's root zone servers and oversight over the way domain names are registered and maintained are just a few of them.

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Almost half the websites pushing malware are hosted by just 10 networks, according to a new report that adds new support to the growing argument that a relatively few number of actors are responsible for most of the net-based threats.

The report (PDF) from StopBadware.org also showed a dramatic rise in China's role in the malware epidemic. Six of the 10 networks were internet service providers or backbone providers based in China and hosted more than 41 percent of the malicious websites.

Not that US companies weren't also contributing to the problem. Three American companies also made the list, including Google, whose blogs hosted 4,261 sites, or about 2 percent of the booby-trapped destinations.

The findings come a few weeks after anti-spam outfit Knujon released a separate report that found that almost 75 percent of spam sites were signed up by just 10 registrars. Once again, the three biggest offenders were located in China and included Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software, BEIJINGNN and Todaynic.

In many cases, owners of sites found pushing counterfeit watches, Viagra and other merchandise touted in spam failed to include correct contact information when registering the sites, as required. In an attempt to crack down on abusers, Knujon has begun reporting offenders to ICANN, which requires all website owners to be listed in a whois director. The sheer volume of the complaints has in some cases put a strain on ICANN's servers.

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A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris.

The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.

"We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated," said Roberto Gaetano, a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

The organisation said it had already been contacted about setting up domains in the Cyrillic script - used in many Eastern European countries.

"This is a huge step forward in the development of the internet - it will unblock something that has prevented a lot of people getting online," said Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy at Nominet, the national registry for .uk domain names.

"At the moment, there are one-and-a-half billion people online and four-and-a-half billion people for whom the Roman script just means nothing."

Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, described passing the resolution as a "historic moment".

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The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ousted a record number of "cybersquatters" from Web sites with domain names referring to trademarked companies, foundations and celebrities in 2007.

WIPO, a U.N. agency based in Geneva, received 2,156 complaints alleging "abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet" last year, up 18 percent from 2006 and 48 percent more than the filings lodged in 2005.

The Scottish National Party not only wants to break up the Union, it has emerged that it is also seeking virtual independence in cyberspace.

Alex Salmond is to lodge a formal request with the organisation responsible for all internet domain names seeking a ".sco" suffix to replace the distinctly Unionist ".co.uk".

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The March 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief released by VeriSign reports that “the Domain Name Industry closed 2007 with more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top-Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 33 million domain name registrations since the close of 2006.”

The full report can be found at: http://www.verisign.com/static/043379.pdf

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Around 350 attendees came from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west, as well as a few people from elsewhere around the globe, to attend Domain Pulse 2008 in Vienna on February 21 and 22. Day one’s focus was internet governance\

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MARINA DEL REY, CA - This is a first Discussion Draft of the Initial Report of the IDNC Working Group (IDNC WG). It is published for comment and input from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) community

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Internet oversight agency ICANN has launched an investigation into the possibility that insider information is being used to snap up desirable domain names before the person or organisation likely to be interested in them has had a chance to buy.

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