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The delegated manager of the Channel Islands' domains .GG and .JE are now full members of a European body, which should enhance their security levels.
Nigel Roberts and Laurie Brown were co-founders of Island Networks, that created the two domains in 1996.
Dr Roberts was one of three representatives from the Channel Island Domain Registry to attend the recently held second annual conference of the 'European Top Level Domain Information Sharing and Analysis Centre' (TLD ISAC) in Brussels.
That was created in 2023 with the aim of sharing best practice and information with fellow cybersecurity experts.
As Founding Director of the Channel Islands Domain Registry, Dr Roberts joined other cybersecurity experts from all over Europe, including the UK and Ireland at the conference, where it was agreed that "the operators of Guernsey and Jersey's top-level domains of .GG and .JE will become full members of ISAC".
Pictured: Dr Nigel Roberts is also a full voting member of the British Academy of Film & Television Arts with a focus on judging video games.
Dr Roberts, also CHANNELISLES.NET’s Director was very pleased with this outcome.
“The achievements of the ISAC in such a short time are remarkable. We are pleased to be able to contribute,” he said.
Dirk Jumpertz, Security Officer with the European Union’s .eu domain and the Chair of TLD-ISAC added: “The ISAC has expanded to improve the internal capabilities of domain registry operators by sharing expertise and knowledge to create a collective defence against cyberthreats.
"We are very happy that our colleagues from Jersey and Guernsey are actively participating.”
Speakers at the conference came from across 'the cybersecurity realm', including a hacker who had been able to obtain access to sensitive data by leveraging expiring domain registrations. Other topics covered included the first-hand experiences of a UK security researcher being on the receiving end of misdirected law enforcement raid in response to the NHS ransomware attack.
Pictured: CHANNELISLES.NET is the operator of .GG and .JE.
Dr Roberts has previously spoken to Express about cyber security issues, particularly around the .GG domain.
“Guernsey has one of the lowest incidents of domain name abuse,” he said in June 2023, revealing that ‘.JE’ was actually the lowest at the time.
Statistics within a 2023 report from DAAR (Domain Abuse Activity Reporting) undertaken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), revealed trends from thousands of .GG sites.
“If size of the .GG zone is taken into account (i.e., the number of domains in zone), in May 2023, on average 0.01% of .GG domains are listed by reputation feeds as phishing domain, 0.00% as malware domains, 0.01% as spam domains, and less than 0.01% listed as botnet command-and-control domains,” said Dr Roberts.
He allegedly used a chatroom which gave members a platform to discuss sexual acts between other people and their unconscious partners.
While the chatroom was found on a site hosted in Bulgaria, the website used to have the Guernsey-registered domain, and – according to a 2023 article in the Telegraph – this meant French authorities found it hard to shut down.
It was shut down within an hour, once the local operator was alerted.
Pictured top: Dr Nigel Roberts.
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