This Abuse Reporting & Handling Policy describes how NICENIC INTERNATIONAL GROUP CO., LIMITED ("NiceNIC") receives, investigates, tracks, and responds to reports of abuse involving domain names sponsored by NiceNIC or other NiceNIC services.
NiceNIC is an ICANN-accredited registrar and maintains abuse-reporting and abuse-handling procedures to meet applicable contractual, registry, legal, security, and service obligations.
An abuse report is an allegation or signal requiring review. Submission of a report does not, by itself, establish that a customer or domain has violated NiceNIC policy, ICANN requirements, registry rules, or applicable law.
NiceNIC seeks to handle reports promptly, fairly, based on available evidence, and with measures proportionate to the circumstances.
Abuse involving a domain name or NiceNIC service should be submitted through one of NiceNIC's official abuse channels:
Online abuse report:
https://nicenic.com/reportabuse.php
Abuse email:
[email protected]
The abuse-reporting mechanism is intended to be accessible without requiring the reporter to hold a NiceNIC customer account.
General customer support, social media, forum messages, or unrelated business contacts are not the preferred channels for abuse reports and may be redirected to the official abuse process.
NiceNIC may nevertheless review or act on credible information received through another channel where required by law, appropriate for security, necessary to protect users, or necessary to satisfy ICANN or registry obligations.
A report should contain enough information to allow NiceNIC to identify the affected resource and evaluate the allegation.
Depending on the issue, useful information may include:
Reporters should avoid submitting unnecessary personal data, passwords, authentication codes, private keys, or unrelated confidential information.
For reports submitted through the official abuse mechanism, NiceNIC will provide a confirmation of receipt sufficient to identify the submission in accordance with applicable ICANN requirements.
Where required by the applicable Registrar Accreditation Agreement, the confirmation will identify at least:
A confirmation of receipt is not a determination that the allegation is valid.
NiceNIC may review:
For gTLDs subject to NiceNIC's ICANN registrar obligations, "DNS Abuse" has the meaning specified by the then-current ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement and related ICANN requirements.
As of the Effective Date of this Policy, the contractual DNS Abuse categories are:
Other harmful or illegal conduct may still violate NiceNIC policy or applicable law even if it does not fall within the ICANN contractual definition of DNS Abuse.
NiceNIC will take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate abuse reports as required by applicable registrar obligations.
Evidence is considered in context. A report does not need to use any particular commercial threat feed or reporting format to be considered.
Where information submitted by a reporter is incomplete, NiceNIC may:
NiceNIC will not require irrelevant evidence merely to delay handling of an otherwise actionable report.
When NiceNIC has actionable evidence that a gTLD Registered Name sponsored by NiceNIC is being used for DNS Abuse, NiceNIC will promptly take mitigation action that is reasonably necessary to stop or otherwise disrupt the Registered Name from being used for that DNS Abuse, as required by the applicable ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
The appropriate action depends on the circumstances, including:
Possible actions may include, where appropriate and permitted:
NiceNIC is not required to apply the same mitigation measure in every case.
A legitimate domain may be abused without the registrant's knowledge because of compromised hosting, credentials, content-management software, DNS settings, or another security failure.
Where reasonably practicable, NiceNIC will consider the risk of collateral damage before applying domain-level suspension.
For a compromised legitimate domain, requesting rapid remediation or applying a narrower mitigation may be more appropriate than immediate suspension if the narrower action is sufficient to stop or disrupt the abuse.
This does not prevent immediate suspension or another stronger measure where the circumstances, severity, continuing harm, legal requirements, or security risk justify it.
Where available evidence indicates that a domain was registered or is controlled primarily for phishing, malware, credential theft, botnet activity, pharming, or another serious abusive purpose, faster domain-level mitigation may be appropriate.
NiceNIC is not required to provide advance notice where doing so would materially increase the risk of harm, enable evasion, frustrate a mandatory requirement, or undermine effective mitigation.
Illegal Activity and DNS Abuse are not identical concepts.
Reports concerning fraud, unlawful goods or services, threats, impersonation, illegal content, sanctions, or other conduct may be handled under applicable law, NiceNIC's Terms of Service & Acceptable Use Policy, registry rules, court orders, or other relevant requirements even where the conduct does not meet the ICANN contractual definition of DNS Abuse.
The legal and technical role of NiceNIC will be considered when determining what action, if any, is appropriate.
Trademark infringement or a dispute over rights in a domain name is not automatically DNS Abuse.
Where the principal dispute concerns who has rights to the domain name, the appropriate mechanism may include:
NiceNIC does not decide the merits of UDRP or URS disputes.
If evidence also demonstrates phishing, credential theft, malware, or another form of DNS Abuse, NiceNIC may separately handle the DNS Abuse aspect.
Copyright complaints are reviewed separately from DNS Abuse unless the reported activity also involves qualifying DNS Abuse or another basis for registrar-level action.
NiceNIC may request information reasonably necessary to identify the copyrighted work, allegedly infringing material, complainant, authority to act, and other information required by the applicable complaint process.
A copyright complaint does not automatically result in suspension of a domain name.
Reports concerning suspected child sexual abuse material or child exploitation are treated as high-risk matters and escalated without unnecessary delay.
NiceNIC may preserve relevant records, restrict an affected service, and cooperate with appropriate authorities, registries, hosting providers, or other relevant entities as required or permitted by law.
Reporters should not unnecessarily copy, download, or redistribute suspected illegal child-abuse material when submitting a report.
A registrar controls domain-registration functions but may not control the website files, application, mail server, or hosting environment associated with the domain.
Where abusive content is hosted by a third party, reporting the activity to the hosting provider or other infrastructure provider may allow more targeted removal.
NiceNIC may nevertheless take registrar-level action where required or appropriate under applicable obligations.
A domain may have been purchased through a NiceNIC reseller while NiceNIC remains the sponsoring registrar.
NiceNIC may coordinate with the reseller during an abuse investigation, but delegation to a reseller does not eliminate NiceNIC's applicable ICANN registrar obligations.
NiceNIC may contact the Registered Name Holder or other customer directly where reasonably necessary for abuse mitigation, security, legal compliance, mandatory notices, or protection of registrant rights.
NiceNIC maintains the dedicated abuse point of contact required by the applicable ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement for qualifying reports of Illegal Activity from law-enforcement, consumer-protection, quasi-governmental, or other qualifying governmental authorities.
Where the applicable Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires it, a well-founded report submitted through the dedicated authority contact will be reviewed within twenty-four (24) hours by a person empowered to take necessary and appropriate action.
NiceNIC is not required to take action that would contravene applicable law.
NiceNIC may authenticate the identity, authority, jurisdiction, and legal basis of a governmental request where appropriate.
NiceNIC may act in response to:
Where legally permitted and appropriate, NiceNIC may seek clarification or legal review of an overbroad, invalid, or unclear request.
Where circumstances permit, NiceNIC may notify a customer or reseller of the allegation and provide an opportunity to remediate.
Advance notice may be omitted where:
Where a domain or service was restricted because of abuse or security concerns, NiceNIC may review a request for restoration after:
Restoration is not guaranteed where a continuing legal, registry, ICANN, security, dispute, or abuse basis requires the restriction to remain.
A customer affected by a discretionary NiceNIC abuse action may request review through NiceNIC's support channel.
The request should identify:
A review request does not suspend a court order, registry requirement, UDRP/URS action, ICANN obligation, or other mandatory restriction.
NiceNIC may communicate with a reporter to request relevant additional information or confirm that a case has been received or reviewed.
Privacy, security, law, and customer confidentiality may limit the information NiceNIC can disclose concerning:
Absence of detailed disclosure to a reporter does not mean a report was ignored.
NiceNIC may consolidate duplicate reports concerning the same issue.
NiceNIC may apply reasonable controls to abusive, misleading, clearly irrelevant, or technically harmful submissions.
Such controls will not be used to prevent legitimate reporters from submitting abuse reports through the required channel.
NiceNIC documents the receipt of and response to abuse reports as required by the applicable ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement and other applicable obligations.
Records are retained for the period required by the applicable Registrar Accreditation Agreement, subject to applicable law.
NiceNIC may provide required records to ICANN Contractual Compliance upon proper request.
Personal data submitted in an abuse report is handled under the NiceNIC Privacy Policy and applicable law.
NiceNIC may disclose information where reasonably necessary to investigate abuse, coordinate mitigation, comply with ICANN or registry requirements, protect users or systems, establish or defend legal claims, or comply with law.
A report, registrar restriction, security action, or temporary mitigation measure is not necessarily a final legal finding that the Registered Name Holder committed unlawful conduct.
NiceNIC may take precautionary or contractual action based on the evidence and obligations applicable at the time.
This Policy should be read with:
Where a mandatory ICANN, registry, court, governmental, or legal requirement conflicts with this Policy, the mandatory requirement controls to the extent of the conflict.
NiceNIC may update this Policy to reflect changes in law, ICANN requirements, registry rules, abuse patterns, security practices, or NiceNIC services.
Changes required by law, ICANN, or a registry may take effect when required.