The listed TLDs have more than 95% of their sites with shady ratings in its main database.
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The recent expansion of top-level domains (TLDs) has created fertile ground for cyber scammers, according to a study published on Tuesday by security company Blue Coat.
These two are followed by the.country domain (99.97%),.kim (99.74%),.cricket (99.57%),.science (99.35%),.work (98.20%),.party (98.07%),.gq (Equatorial Guinea) (97.68%), and.link (96.98%). “In order to build a better security posture, knowledge about which sites are the most suspicious, and how to avoid them, is essential for consumers and businesses alike”.
Blue Coat analyzed millions of web requests up to mid-August from over 15,000 businesses and 75 million web users to compile “The Web’s Shadiest Neighbourhoods”, scanning for spam, phishing, scams, malware, potentially unwanted software, botnets, and suspicious activity. Numerous websites serve up pages that mimic popular video and image sites and prompt unprotected visitors to unwittingly download malware. Of course, these rankings may be distorted by the fact that there are so few records in Blue Coat’s database for these domains-.zip isn’t even officially available yet from domain registrars, so it’s not clear how there were any records for it at all. There have been additionally questionable e-book websites with the.science area and a number of other that promoted educational plagiarism, providing custom-written essays on the market, it stated.
On the flip side, the report identified what it said were the 10 safest domains.
While new TLDs are gaining in registered websites and visits, some are being used in ways they were not intended for.
Top-level domains (TLDs), aka internet neighborhoods, are similar to real-world addresses in the sense that some are shadier than others.
“The typical individual off the road can not go and purchase a.mil area”, he defined. “You have to be associated with the government. As a result of that, it’s an incredibly safe TLD”. As the number of TLDs has increased, so have the opportunities for attackers. In the early days of the web, there were only a handful to choose from including com, .net, .edu and.gov, as well as some “country code” domains like.FR (France), and.JP (Japan).
An initiative was recently launched by ICANN, the governing body of Web identifiers, which aims to expand the number of TLDs in an effort to stimulate both competition and choice online, but the proliferation of Web domains continues to be exploited by cybercriminals.
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