Parked Domains are a serious problem
32 million parked domains were generated during May 2006 alone
Parked domains are not just for accidentally spelled domain names any longer.
Bob Parson's (founder of GoDaddy.com) had a recent article in his blog about "domain
kiting" schemes. (Read his blog)
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From Bob's Blog:
"Domain kiting continues out of control!
The numbers are now in for May 2006 and the domain kiting problem continues
to rage out of control. In fact, it’s as bad as ever.
92.3% of May registrations were kited domains!
Consider this: Just over 35 million names were registered for the month of May.
Of those just over 2.7 million were permanent registrations. That means that 92.3%
of all domain names registered were part of a scam now known as domain kiting. These
names were kept off of the market, they were used to generate search engine revenue
– AND BECAUSE OF A LOOPHOLE ICANN REFUSES TO ELIMINATE – those 32.3 million names
were used without being paid for."
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(Read his blog) |
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Many of these domains are used to distribute illegal software to users machines
(spyware). Message Labs Intelligence also reports that crimals are using these
parked domains to install malicious software to unsuspecting users. In most
cases they never even pay for the domain. They hold the domain for a brief
period of time, and then release it before being required to pay for it.
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MessageLabs Intelligence Report Details Geographic and Industry Variances in Spam,
Virus and Phishing Activity ...
“The reality we face today is that cyber criminals have become more adept at harvesting
infected computers’ address books and using simple techniques to amplify their reach,”
said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer, MessageLabs. “This has turned the traditional
botnet or zombie into a virtual spam cannon – capable of blasting out millions of
emails a day. Disposable domains are also becoming a larger problem via a tactic
known as ‘domain kiting’ in which cyber criminals acquire domains without paying
for them and use them for illegal gains.”
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(Read the full article on JustLoadIT.com) |
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These are just a few of the many reasons why we continually crawl the web looking
for new domains. We find tens of thousands of parked domains every week, most
of them very short lived.
If a Safe To View user goes to a site that we have never seen before that site is
automatically added to our crawlers to be visited.
If the site is found
to be malicious it is added to the appropriate
category and published live often within 15 minutes.
We currently crawl over 11 million domains a month looking for malicious content
to ensure your web experience is truely Safe To View.
Would you like to help?