The Top 10 TLDs with Shady Sites

[eyedomainous]

A security firm, BlueCoat.com, analyzed hundreds of millions of Web requests from more than 15,000 businesses and 75 million users to create “The Web’s Shadiest Neighborhoods”. The Report shows that more than 95 percent of websites in 10 new Top Level Domains (Blue Coat looked at) are suspicious.

"As the number of TLDs has increased, so have the opportunities for attackers. These TLDs, with high numbers of shady sites dubbed “Shady TLDs” can provide fertile ground for malicious activity including spam, phishing, and distribution of Potentially Unwanted Software (PUS)."

The Web’s Top 10 TLDs with Shady Sites:

Rank | TLD | Percentage of Shady Sites

#1 .zip 100.00%

#2 .review 100.00%

#3 .country 99.97%

#4 .kim 99.74%

#5 .cricket 99.57%

#6 .science 99.35%

#7 .work 98.20%

#8 .party 98.07%

#9 .gq (Equatorial Guinea) 97.68%

#10 .link 96.98%

Note: Blue Coat is advising their clients to block these TLDs, and I assume they will report on another batch of TLDs in the future.

 

[MarkedMarket]

This study was also featured on the website TheDomains yesterday, and is highly questionable (to say the least). As they pointed out there, .ZIP has not even launched, so how can that extension be on top of the list? As it turns out, there is only one registered .ZIP domain: nic (.) zip

They have based this conclusion on the assessment of only one .ZIP domain, so this study cannot be taken seriously at all, and neither the company that has conducted this study.

 

[eyedomainous]

Clearly BlueCoat has a vested interest in 'security marketing'. Just as TheDomains has a vested interest in the new TLDs.

The 'truth' is somewhere in the mix... but much, if not most, of the spam and scams that hit my email box these days comes from new TLDs... including some that have not (officially) launched, but seem to have active 'reserves', pre-regs, or, perhaps, they are masked.

The 'take away' I get from the report is "The more flesh, the more worms".