Phishing and domain-enabled fraud are not “edge cases” in today’s threat landscape - they are a primary entry point. reports that phishing remains the dominant initial intrusion vector in Europe, accounting for 60% of cases in the reporting period covered by the ENISA Threat Landscape 2025. Against that backdrop, most organisations still rely heavily on passive controls: email filtering, URL reputation checks, and third‑party abuse lists. These controls matter - but they do not end the threat. They flag malicious infrastructure; they do not remove it.

Phishing, fraud, malware, and brand impersonation do not scale because attackers are especially clever - they scale because the internet makes it cheap and anonymous to stand up new infrastructure. At the centre of that problem sits domain registration. If domains can be registered globally with minimal identity verification, cybercrime will continue to industrialize faster than defenders can respond. This article examines why anonymous registration has become one of the internet’s most powerful abuse enablers - and what would change if registrars worldwide treated identity verification as a security control, not a formality.

Cybercrime is Booming: The past year has seen an unprecedented surge in cybercrime activity, much of it underpinned by domain name abuse. The total number of malware, phishing, and spam attacks grew by 54% year-over-year to reach 16.3 million incidents, with threat actors weaponizing an estimated 8.6 million unique domain names for these attacks.

DNSSEC is an essential feature for ensuring the integrity and security of your online presence. Without it, you expose your users to fraud and risk your organisation’s reputation. However, implementing DNSSEC can be complicated, especially for large domain portfolios with thousands of domains.

One of the biggest online vulnerabilities for organisations today is lack of control of their digital assets, which leaves the doors open for all kinds of abuse, including brand impersonation and domain takeovers. The consequences of this, both to brand reputation and finances, can be severe. But there is an easy way to prevent this - proper management.

Domain registrars that allow domains to be registered without any kind of identification required make it very easy for cybercriminals to commit crimes in complete anonymity. Unfortunately, there are many of these rogue registrars around and they are endangering businesses and people by not implementing industry standards and best practices.

There are many reasons to secure and closely control your digital IP. An important reason is to protect your organization from online brand abuse, where malicious third parties use your brand name to commit fraud.