According to AusRegistry’s General Manager, George Pongas, the new security measure - .auLOCKDOWN - developed and operated by the company, will allow .au domain name owners to lock their domain’s name server delegations and prevent changes other than by pre-authorised registrars with authenticated access.

While available to all .au domain name owners, Ponga said .auLOCKDOWN was primarily aimed at large and high profile businesses in the corporate sector to offer them an added layer of protection for their online assets dependent on their domain name.

Pongas said the launch of .auLOCKDOWN followed recent high profile security incidents in other countries that led to the unauthorised access of domain names such as google.ie, yahoo.ie and google.ke.

“In these cases the nameserver delegation information was maliciously changed to redirect visitors from these websites to other fraudulent websites, significantly disrupting business operations and damaging brand reputations.

“.auLOCKDOWN adds an additional layer of authorisation at the Registry level that protects domain names in the unlikely event of a registrar security incident or website hack that leads to unauthorised access to confidential data and systems.

“It also stops mistakes from occurring within an organisation, where domain names are accidentally updated by employees.”

According to Pongas, accidental updates are perhaps the most frequent and likely incident to occur, and, although innocent in origin, he said the impact could be just as significant and damaging as those with a malicious origin.

“.auLOCKDOWN provides the added level of protection that I know many CIOs for the largest companies in Australia are looking for. It’s about creating redundancy to deliver multiple layers of protection.”

.auLOCKDOWN is only available to .au domain name owners through their .au accredited registrar. A list of all .au accredited registrars can be found here.