ICANN, having thought they were almost there in resolving the technical glitch that forced them to close the TLD application system, or TAS, on 12 April, seem to be still some way from reopening the TAS. However they do believe they have indentified what caused the issue and developed a patch to fix it.
In a statement Friday Akram Atallah, ICANN's chief operating officer, said the organisation is now unable to provide a specific date for reopening the application system.
Identifying which applicants may have been affected by the technical glitch, and determining who may have been able to see someone else's data has required extensive analysis of a very large data set. It has proven to be a time-consuming task, but one they consider essential to ensuring that all potentially affected applicants are accurately identified and notified.
But once ICANN gives notice of reopening the TAS, all applicants will be given notice and an opportunity to review and complete their applications and will be given at least five business days to complete any applications.
To explain the problems that have been encountered, ICANN have prepared a video interview with their Vice President and Chief Security Officer Jeff Moss that describes the glitch that led ICANN to the taking offline of the TAS.
In the interview conducted by ICANN's Brad White, Moss describes the glitch, and elaborates on how ICANN technical teams are working to test a fix for the issue that led to a temporary suspension of the application system on 12 April.
In the interview, Moss bluntly says there has been no indication of any hacking, or any other intrusion, that has caused the problems. But it was the most prudent thing given if it was a serious intrusion, it would have caused much greater problems.
Moss confirmed that a minority of applicants would have been able to see user names and file names "but they wouldn't be able to see the contents of the file." One of the activities ICANN is undertaking is seeing who could see this information and this information will be reviewed when ICANN have verified its accuracy to "prevent any monkey business."
Click here for the ICANN interview with Jeff Moss on TAS
Moss said there are "no indicators of compromise" of any data. "Everything points to a problem in the way interrupted file deletions occurred."
Commenting on ICANN being first alerted to the problem on 19 March, and taking until 12 April to take the TAS offline, Moss said "in hindsight we now realise that the 19th was the first expression of this problem. But at that point in time we had no reason to believe there was a problem. The information that was displayed didn't make any sense to the applicant and it appeared to be random numbers. And we never heard back any further information, and we couldn't reproduce this problem."
Before the TAS is back online, Moss said ICANN has to make sure the patch they "have developed is 100 per cent accurate and addresses the underlying problem."
The next update will be given no later than 27 April which will be an update on the reopening of the system and the publication of the applied-for new domain names.