Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group

Industry:	Internet
Founded:	2004
Headquarters:	San Francisco, California
Country:	USA
Website:	www.maawg.org
Key People
Jerry Upton, Executive Director Michael O’Reirdan, Chairman Alex Bobotek, Co-Vice Chairman Chris Roosenraad, Co-Vice Chairman Dave Crocker, Senior Advisor

MAAWG is the acronym for Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, which is a non-profit international organization primarily engaged in preventing online abuses such denial of service attacks, phishing, spam, viruses and many other cyber crimes. The organization uses industry collaboration, technology, and public policy to provide solutions related to online messaging abuses. MAAWG was founded in 2004 and its headquarters is located in San Francisco, California.

Since its establishment, MAAWG has been active in helping protect internet users and promote online security by publishing documents regarding the improvement of online security. It also publishes a quarterly e-mail metrics report that covers around 500 million mailboxes. It is used to analyze the trend and to track dangerous e-mail abuses. MAAWG also provides comments on public policies and provides training courses related to cyber security. Its documents are published in different languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German,Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The members of MAAWG are categorized as Sponsor, Full Member and Supporter. Some of the organizations sponsor members are AOL, AT&T, France Telecom, Cloudmark Inc., Facebook, Yahoo!. The members of the organization meet three times a year to discuss the latest issues on messaging security, bot mitigation practices, social networking abuse as well as on-going policies and legislation conducted by different governments and other organizations involved in cyber security.

ICANN Involvement

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group actively shares its commentaries on various ICANN policies. On July 28, 2010, MAAWG praised the internet governing body's initiative in preparing an initial report regarding its plans to improve the Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA). MAAWG supported the issues identified as high priority on the Initial Report on Proposals for Improvements to the RAA and emphasized that these should be incorporated on the new RAA. These issues include:

• It is the registrar's responsibility to investigate malicious conduct
• A competent technical point of contact on malicious conduct issues should be designated and available 24/7
• Registrars should ensure the availability of privacy/proxy services on registration such as data escrow, relay function and reveal function
• Registrars has the right to cancel registrations made by other privacy/proxy services for noncompliance with Relay and Reveal under proper circumstances
• Identify situations requiring registrars to cancel registrations with fraud or false Whois data provided
• PCI compliance should be required in the registration process
• Provide a clear definition for "reseller" and registrar's responsibility for reseller compliance
• Registrars should be required to fully disclose affiliates/multiple accreditations as well as the registrar contact information, type of business organization,officers, etc

MAAWAG also provided comments on the following issues:

• ICANN Study on the Prevalence of Domain Names Registered using a Privacy or Proxy Registration Service among the top 5 gTLDs
• ICANN’s proposed 2011 Plan for Enhancing Internet Security, Stability and Resiliency
• ICANN Whois Review Team
• ICANN’s Draft FY2012 Budget

Senior Technical Advisors

• Dr Richard Clayton, Security Researcher-University of Cambridge
• Dave Crocker, Brandenburg InternetWorking-Principal
• David Dagon, J.D. Florida State University College of Law
• John R. Levine, Taughannock Networks-Founder
• April Lorenzen, Internet Security Researcher
• Dr. Joe St Sauver, Manager Internet2 Security Programs