Experts say that Bangladesh’s own internet country code top-level domain “.bd “is one of the worst managed domains in the world.
For a clearer perspective of the issue we will start with the beginning: a country’s code top-level domain which is a unique two-letter string that has been assigned to a country or a geographical area to identify it in a domain name. A domain name uniquely identifies a site on the internet.
Unfortunately when it comes to the public domain for internet in Bangladesh, experts have found it vulnerable to hackingdue to: its weak security system, the absence of a mirror server plus the outdated version that is running on.
In its declaration an IT expert, Sumon Ahmed Sabir, said that Bangladesh’s country code domain often does not support the service,strengthening the flaws of the security system :“The domain is vulnerable to risks. It has no modern security system and one can easily hack the domain.”
Since the”.bd” domain was launched, in 1999, the software has never been upgraded in spite of Bangladesh’s government declared plan for launching another operation for a domain for websites in the Bangla language, in 2011.
In one of his declarations Mahfuz Uddin Ahmad, the managing director of state-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Ltd that operates the domain system, stated that “There is still scope to work on the domain”. Nevertheless the software that operates the server is still on the 4.8 version in spite of the 9.9.5 version which is currently being used globally, for the same service.
In a time where all globally domains have migrated to a version where billions of IP addresses can be opened -IPV6, Bangladesh has been felt behind with IPV4 which has limited access when it comes to IP addresses.
Two years ago,a director of Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission recommended that the system should be handed over to a private operator or entity but the proposal was refused by the Telecom Ministry. The same director remarked that Bangladesh domain is not digitally signed “So, the public web portals can be hacked easily” and that most of the local content providers prefer to use foreign domains as they are more secure, draining foreign currency. Local companies would have used the country domain if the server had been up to date. Unfortunately, a good source of income has been lost, the BTRC official concluded.
A former president of Bangladesh Computer Samity, the national association of ICT companies, Mustafa Jabbaris another voice that draws attention regarding this issue :“You cannot register any site from your home or office using the online payment system, as it is still traditional.Bureaucracy is a great obstacle to business”, he said. “We should have a huge number of domain names on our own server, but that did not happen as people are unwilling due to the problems in its management.”
During his statement he also points out that the rural population can’t use websites in their mother language, adding that “We could have searched our institutionsnames in Bangla, but that did not happen in the last three years.”
Despite of all this complaints which are more than known AKM FahimMasroor, former president of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, an ICT trade body, said: “We are not interested in the local domain service for security reasons.”
