Europol together with law enforcement and intelligence services of 19 countries, including the U.S., Great Britain, France, Colombia, Albania and Lithuania has conducted an operation to curb the activities of counterfeit product distributors in the domain space. This operation is the third one in the last 12 months. During joint actions 292 domains were seized. They are involved in counterfeit trade, in particular luxury goods, sportswear, electronics, pharmaceuticals and audio-visual products.
It’s impossible to access blocked domains now, in some cases when a visitor tries to open them, they find a banner that notifies them and it is a crime to willfully participate in copyright infringement. What will happen to the domains later is for countries’ respective agencies to decide. 1829 domains altogether were blocked for counterfeit distribution during three operations.
“International practice shows that to combat criminals on the Internet it is vitally important to cooperate with different organizations that gather and analyze information about malicious websites. This is the principle behind “Netoscope”, for example. Within this project different expert organizations provide information about discovered vulnerabilities in a single database. More than two years of functioning proved that this is more than effective”, said Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet.
