Greg Aaron

Country:	USA
Email:	greg [at] illumintel.com
LinkedIn:	[greg-aaron Greg Aaron]
Currently a member of ICANN's SSAC

Greg Aaron is President of Illumintel Inc., which provides advising and security services to top-level-domain registry operators and other Internet companies. He is an internationally recognized authority on the abuse of domain names and Internet crime, and has launched and managed an extraordinary number of top-level domains. He is an expert on registry operations, launches and Sunrises, and domain name intellectual property issues.

Career at Afilias, 2001-2011

Greg was previously Director of Key Account Management and Domain Security at Afilias. He was part of the Afilias team that launched .info in 2001; he managed .info between 2001 to 2005 and 2008 to 2011, handling Sunrises, creating product business requirements, and running business operations. In 2003, Greg led the development of a new registry platform for Afilias and migrated a number of ccTLDs onto it, including .ag, .gi, .hn, .la, .sc, and .vc. Greg advised the Government of India and registry operator NIXI regarding domain and related Internet policies from 2004 to 2008, and in 2004 led the re-launch of India's ccTLD, .in, on new systems with a set of liberalized policies. The .in domain grew from 6,500 domains to more than 450,000 in short order, and Greg also led the creation of a test-bed for deploying IDNs in Indic languages. In 2006, Greg directed the service rollout for the .mobi TLD on behalf of Afilias' customer mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd., and managed .mobi services into 2008. After a smooth rollout, .mobi became the largest and most prominent domain from the last round of new TLDs. In 2008, Greg directed the highly successful introduction of .me, the ccTLD for Montenegro, in a partership between Afilias, GoDaddy, and doMEn. In 2011, Greg helped ICM Registry create the business requirements and launch plan for the .xxx registry.

Security and Anti-abuse

Greg created and oversaw Afilias' highly successful security programs, designed to address abuses such as phishing, malware, spam, child sexual abuse images, and botnets. He wrote the industry-leading .info Anti-Abuse Policy, which has been adapted to other TLDs, including .org and by many of the new gTLD registries launching in 2013 and beyond. In 2010, Greg accepted an OTA Excellence in Online Trust Award for the program. He regularly interacts with law enforcement personnel regarding e-crime issues.

Greg joined ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) in October 2011. Greg also serves as Research Fellow at the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), and is co-chair of the APWG's Internet Policy Committee (IPC). He is the co-author of the ongoing Global Phishing Survey series, which is the major source of phishing metrics and analysis. He also participates in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), and regularly makes presentations at security conferences around the world.

Greg was the Chair of ICANN's Registration Abuse Policy Working Group. He was a member of ICANN's Joint DNS Security and Stability Analysis Working Group (DSSA), and ICANN's Fast-Flux Working Group.

New TLD Program

Greg was the senior industry expert on the Ernst & Young team that evaluated new gTLD applications in 2012-2013, reviewing the applicant responses regarding registry services, rights protection mechanisms, security, and registry operations. He contributed input and revisions to the various versions of the Applicant Guidebook in 2009 to 2011.

Other

Previously, he worked at Internet companies such as Travelocity and CitySearch, and in 1997 became one of the first bloggers to cover Silicon Valley.

He lives in Philadelphia, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar.

Videos

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Greg Aaron being interviewed by Jeremy Hitchcock at ICANN 35 about the Registration Abuse Working Group.

Top-Level Domain

Country code top-level domain

Intellectual Property Constituency