The holiday shopping season is nearly over, and online shopping is setting new records. Half of all holiday shoppers are purchasing gifts online this year, and total online sales are on track to increase 23 percent over last year’s holiday season.
Shopping online has never been simpler or more secure, but as Internet use continues to increase at a record rate, so do threats to Internet security. Despite increasingly sophisticated anti-spam software and a variety of new regulations, as much as 91 percent of worldwide email traffic is now considered spam. Crooks continue to run "phishing" and "pharming" scams to steal the identities of innocent Internet users. Virus writers are getting more and more sophisticated in their attacks on the system.
For the holiday season, NetChoice released a white paper that examines e-Commerce trends in 2006. The paper also calls on ICANN to do more to maintain the integrity of the domain name system by implementing DNS security extensions (DNSSEC) and other network level security measures to fight phishing, pharming, and other security threats.