June 21, 2020: Today, the DotGov Program announces our intent to preload the .gov TLD in the future. We believe the security benefits that come from preloading are meaningful and necessary to continue meeting the public’s expectation of safety on .gov services. We believe that government websites should always be secure. Click here to learn more about the steps we are taking to reach this goal.

March 5, 2020: Effective on March 10, 2020, the DotGov Program will begin requiring notarized signatures on all authorization letters when submitting a request for a new .gov domain. This is a necessary security enhancement to prevent mail and wire fraud through signature forgery in obtaining a .gov domain. This step will help maintain the integrity of .gov and ensure that .gov domains continue to be issued only to official U.S. government organizations.

July 17, 2019: We’re implementing a new DNS security measure for all .gov domains to help mitigate future risks associated with DNS hijacking incidents. Click here to learn more about DotGov’s new DNS auto-notification emails.

December 6, 2018: You can now add a security contact to the .gov registrar. See our new domain security best practices.