Source: Interisle Consulting Group.
ICANN said its review was based on information collected and studied about .top domains over the past few weeks. But the fact that high volumes of phishing sites are being registered through Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co Ltd. is hardly a new trend.
For example, more than 10 years ago the same Chinese registrar was the fourth most common source of phishing websites, as tracked by the APWG. Bear in mind that the APWG report excerpted below was published
Source: APWG phishing report from 2013, two years before .top came into being.
A fascinating new wrinkle in the phishing landscape is the growth in scam pages hosted via the
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized data storage and delivery network that is based on peer-to-peer networking. According to Interisle, the use of IPFS to host and launch phishing attacks — which can make phishing sites more difficult to take down — increased a staggering 1,300 percent, to roughly 19,000 phishing sites reported in the last year.
Last year’s report from Interisle found that domain names ending in “.us” — the top-level domain for the United States —
were among the most prevalent in phishing scams. While .us domains are not even on the Top 20 list of this year’s study, “.com” maintained its perennial #1 spot as the largest source of phishing domains overall.
A year ago, the phishiest domain registrar by far was
Freenom, a now-defunct registrar that handed out free domains in several country-code TLDs, including .tk, .ml, .ga and .cf. Freenom went out of business after
being sued by Meta, which alleged Freenom ignored abuse complaints while monetizing traffic to abusive domains.
Following
Freenom’s demise, phishers quickly migrated to other new low-cost TLDs and to services that allow anonymous, free domain registrations — particularly subdomain services. For example, Interisle found phishing attacks involving websites created on Google’s
blogspot.com skyrocketed last year more than 230 percent. Other subdomain services that saw a substantial growth in domains registered by phishers include
weebly.com,
github.io,
wix.com, and
ChangeIP, the report notes.
Source: Interisle Consulting.
Interisle Consulting partner
Dave Piscitello said ICANN could easily send similar warning letters to at least a half-dozen other top-level domain registries, noting that spammers and phishers tend to cycle through the same TLDs periodically — including
.xyz,
.info,
.support and
.lol, all of which saw considerably more business from phishers after Freenom’s implosion.
Piscitello said domain registrars and registries could significantly reduce the number of phishing sites registered through their services just by flagging customers who try to register huge volumes of domains at once. Their study found that at least 27% of the domains used for phishing were registered in bulk — i.e. the same registrant paid for hundreds or thousands of domains in quick succession.
The report includes a case study in which a phisher this year registered 17,562 domains over the course of an eight-hour period — roughly 38 domains per minute — using .lol domains that were all composed of random letters.
ICANN tries to resolve contract disputes privately with the registry and registrar community, and experts say the nonprofit organization usually only publishes enforcement letters when the recipient is ignoring its private notices. Indeed, ICANN’s letter notes Jiangsu Bangning didn’t even open its emailed notifications. It also cited the registry for falling behind in its ICANN membership fees.
With that in mind, a review of
ICANN’s public enforcement activity suggests two trends: One is that there have been far fewer public compliance and enforcement actions in recent years — even as the number of new TLDs has expanded dramatically.
The second is that in a majority of cases, the failure of a registry or registrar to pay its annual ICANN membership fees was cited as a reason for a warning letter. A review of nearly two dozen enforcement letters ICANN has sent to domain registrars since 2022 shows that failure to pay dues was cited as a reason (or
the reason) for the violation at least 75 percent of the time.
Piscitello, a former ICANN board member, said nearly all breach notices sent out while he was at ICANN were because the registrar owed money.
“I think the rest is just lipstick to suggest that ICANN’s on top of DNS Abuse,” Piscitello said.
KrebsOnSecurity has sought comment from ICANN and will update this story if they respond.
Published: 2024-07-23T19:41:51
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