NIC.BW is one of the proactive registries in Africa that has implemented DNS Security. DNS is a critical foundation of any online business and DNS security solutions are built to protect users from threats such as Man-in-the-middle attacks, denial of service, cache poisoning and spoofing. To maintain integrity of DNS traffic and trust, BOCRA implemented opendnssec, signing its .bw domains.

Through this solution, .bw can verify the authenticity of responses received from various name servers. DNS security basically allows each zone to maintain a set of private/public key pairs and for each DNS record, a unique digital signature is generated and encrypted using the private key. The corresponding public key is then authenticated via a chain of trust by keys belonging to parent zones. This means .bw resolvers reject responses that do not have the correct signatures. In essence, DNS Security effectively prevents DNS query responses from being tampered with.

NIC.BW has also implemented an anti-phishing and malware tool – Netcraft. This is a take down tool that looks out for suspicious content on all .bw domains and effectively takes down such domains that are susceptible to phishing, shellattacks and other malware.