Collaboration between eurid and europol

AuthorPaulovics, Ivett
Pages34-35
STUDY ON EVALUATION OF PRACTICES FOR COMBATING SPECULATIVE AND ABUSIVE DOMAIN NAME
REGISTRATIONS
34
7. COLLABORATION BETWEEN EURID AND EUROPOL
7.1 About Europol
The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, better known under the
name Europol, formerly the European Police Office and Europol Drugs Unit, is the law
enforcement agency of the European Union formed on 1 October 1998 to handle criminal
intelligence and combat serious international organised crime and terrorism through
cooperation between competent authorities of EU Member States.57 Europol is seated in
The Hague, Netherlands.
Europol is mandated by the EU to assist Member States in fighting international crime,
such as illicit drugs, trafficking in human beings, intellectual property crime, cybercrime,
euro counterfeiting and terrorism, by serving as a centre for law enforcement co-
operation, expertise and criminal intelligence.
Among other operations, Europol has recently shut down 30.506 domain names for IPR
infringement.58
7.2 Formalisation of the collaboration between EURid and Europol
On 20 December 2016 EURid and Europol signed a Memorandum of Understanding.
According t o EURid the collaboration with Europol has no specific procedures or
interfaces in place. It aims at sharing relevant knowledge with each other on a regular
basis, by attending each other’s conferences and seminars, as well as mutually improving
efficiency in fighting abuse in the online space by exchanging best practices. Interactions
occur between individual members. The parties are working on formalising processes. For
instance, EURid is currently sending the same suspicious domains list it shares with the
Belgian CERT to Europol’s Cyber Intelligence common mailbox.
Europol reported that the parties have worked together especially on botnet take downs
(operation Avalanche) and intellectual property-crime related investigations since 2016.
Workshops and panels on DNS abuse were also organised together59.
In November 2019, the two bodies decided to step up their cooperation and started a pilot
project whereby EURid would share lists of suspicious domains identified by its Abuse
Prevention and Early Warning System (APEWS), which carries out an assessment of
possibly malicious domains before their effective delegation. T he list is also fed by
EURid’s post delegation checks which analyse the .eu zone for possible abusive domain
names. Europol states that the list of suspicious domains which will be shared by EURid
does not include personal data, yet it will provide Europol with useful information when
investigating different types of cybercrimes in which domains are used such as botnets,
malware distribution, as well as intellectual property-related crimes. When EURid will need
to share personal data (name of domain registrants, IP addresses etc.) the information will
57 https://www.europol.europa.eu/about-europol
58 https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/30-506-internet-domain-names-shut-down-for-intellectual-property-
infringement
59 https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/europol-enhances-cybercrime-and-internet-security-cooperation-
signing-mou-eurid; https://eurid.eu/en/news/eu-europol-cybercrime-workshop/

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