Riskiest Web Domains To Visit 106
wiredmikey writes "According to a report released today, .COM is the riskiest top-level domain, the riskiest country domain is Vietnam (.VN). Japan's .JP ranks as the safest country domain for the second year in a row and TRAVEL as the safest overall domain. It's interesting to note that .JP (currently $89.99 at GoDaddy) and .TRAVEL ($89.99 at Moniker) domains are also some of the most expensive domains. Are cybercriminals getting cheap with other people's credit cards? Or do the higher price make it more risky?"
The higher prices... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They're supposed to ensure the registration is legit by default. This is just a way of extracting higher prices for doing their job.
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yes they should be doing it by default - and they did when the net started - i remember paying 35$ a year and was voice verified and a letter. now days they don't give a shit because if they don't verify then there is nothing anyone can do.
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Yep. GoDaddy disregards the law in most of their ways of doing business, so to think they would verify registrant info is a joke!
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Domain Tasting
Cheap domains let them drop a few thousand dollars on a one-time credit card and keep recycling them. That's where they get things like "vniht698.com" and just keep recycling them without paying. Supposedly ICANN finally made the 20 cent fee non-refundable so that in lots of 1000+ it starts costing non-trivial money.
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I'll just avoid all .com domains! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is quite possibly the most pointless report ever compiled.
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This is quite possibly the most pointless report ever compiled.
Not according to travel.jp ;-)
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*.jp is safer because that country uses almost nothing but DSL. ;-)
That's my story and sticking with it.
Re:I'll just avoid all .com domains! (Score:5, Funny)
'This is quite possibly the most pointless report ever compiled.'
It doesn't even warn about the most dangerous TLD of all, ".pl", which is really just a trick to get the victim to execute a Perl script! URLs with this suffix usually map to a site with unintelligible placeholder text (looks like rot13 or something, e.g.: http://www.linux.pl/ [linux.pl] ) but by the time you see this the script has already been run and the damage done!
How does Perl usually look? (Score:1)
Please, do tell, how do you determine if Perl has been encrypted with rot13?
It still works, and usually it even does the same thing, only with better syntax. I'm pretty sure that rot-13 encryption is a stage of Perl debugging.
As for dangerous domains - you forgot ".sh". Sites from this domain could do rm -rf before you click "back".
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This is quite possibly the most pointless report ever compiled.
I am sure a majority of federal and state government reports would compete favorably for that prize.
We need a new domain like .xxx (Score:5, Funny)
We could call it .MALWARE or .INFECTED or .BADSTUFFINSTALLEDONYOURCOMPUTER. All the bad stuff would be relegated to this new domain.
Please note that my idea is no less insightful than the referenced article which is very insightful.
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All we have to do is check for the Evil Bit! [wikipedia.org] Brilliant!
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Dear Mr. Smith
Your Paypal account details are out of date. You need to update your profile within 30 days to avoid having your account closed. Please complete this process as soon as possible by clicking the link below. Thank you for your time
Paypal Updates [www.paypal.infected]
Sincerely
The Paypal Team
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A new TLD, sure, you could call it .CON !!!
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How about .face for Facebook and .twit for Twitter. Talk about nasty domains.
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Yes, but microsoft.BADSTUFFINSTALLEDONYOURCOMPUTER is too long a domain name.
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Apparently, no.
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There is a difference between registering a domain name and paying for hosting. If you paid $56 to register a .com domain, you got ripped off. If you paid $56 for a year of hosting, you got a great deal...
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ugh, and what if I only paid about 16$ for a year of simple hosting? :-)
.cx is riskiest (Score:5, Funny)
Re:.cx is riskiest (Score:5, Funny)
Measurements? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you measure risk?
If a domain is 100% infected with software that cleans up your inbox for you more "risky" than one 50% infected with software that goes and registers you as a sex offender, steals your credit card numbers and posts your porn habits on the web?
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one 50% infected with software that goes and registers you as a sex offender, steals your credit card numbers and posts your porn habits on the web?
Facebook?
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This Survey Will Soon Have No Meaning (Score:3, Informative)
Even scamming is a business (Score:3, Informative)
The best way to increase profit is by reducing cost.
Buying a domain for $90 dollars is far more expensive than a domain for $5-10 bucks.
Also, people are used to seeing ".com" addresses. .TRAVEL, et al are still relatively new.
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The best way to increase profit is by reducing cost.
I know this is verging on off topic, but I have to disagree with this completely. This reminds me of the corporate tactics of today. Surely if we aren't spending money, we'll make tons of money!
The only way this strategy ever works is when you are guaranteed to have maxed out on every single opportunity for growth, be it "vertical", "organic", "synergized" or otherwise. Cutting cost isn't always the best way to increase profit, its simply the easiest becau
Not just malware (Score:2)
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That's pretty much what I was going to say. From my point of view, any site that tries to compromise my privacy is a security risk, and most of the big data-rapists are on .coms, Google analytics, Facebook, Webtrends, etc.. These advertisers and tracking domains are dotted about very liberally on the web, and there are few pages I load these days that don't have something blocked in Adblock, or an untrusted domain in NoScript.
Shit, just had a look in Adblock for this page, and there is another domain that I
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The info page [ghostery.com] reveals that Demandbase offers to track "all Web site visitors in your target market, including those who do not submit their contact information" and allow you to "integrate them with your direct marketing programs - from email campaigns to telesales". So yeah, they advertise knowing uncom
Don't give ICANN/domain registrars any ideas! (Score:1)
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Like verisign does for https certificates?
besides that, not the domain name, but your surfing habits and security measures mean a lot more than if it is a .com or even https. You are not safe on a safe reputable site. They can be hacked or host 3th party content (ADs?!)
Re:Don't give ICANN/domain registrars any ideas! (Score:4, Funny)
They can be hacked or host 3th party content (ADs?!)
OH NOES!!! Not the dreaded thirth party content!
Sorry, I couldn't help it. I'll probably fulfill Muphrey's law in some way with this post anyway.
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Oops, the e was actually unintentional. Well, at least I fulfilled my own prophecy...
Re:Don't give ICANN/domain registrars any ideas! (Score:4, Informative)
not unit price, but total (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't the $89.99, but the $89.99 times 1000 junk domains.
Plus different TLD operators have different policies: some actually police who can register, requiring that the perp put some effort into pretending to be eligible to use them. .COM obviously does not.
There's also the factor that nobody has ever heard of .TRAVEL (so it looks bogus), but .COM is familiar and friendly-looking.
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Law of small numbers (Score:2)
Another major contributor to this crap is their bad statistics. This is a law of small numbers, similar to when a baseball player is batting .500 early in the season (a .400 season's average is godly). There isn't enough data to make that a meaningful number. TLDs like .VN are very small quantities, so they are easily overrun by a few spammers buying their typical bulk quantities of spamvertising domains.
Reports like this can accidentally suggest dangerous blanket blacklisting. I think it's far better
Even more safe (Score:5, Interesting)
My country domain (Bulgaria - bg) costs 130$ and only one company can sell is - register.bg. For many years we all have complained about this monopoly, there was many petitions and stuff (we won in some way - now there`re two resellers working for register.bg) but this way has some advantages for example:
1. No one could register government like domains - president.bg and so on .bg domain, if someone try to use it for illegal purpuses register.bg will wipe the domain and file official complain to the police. .bg, they get to choose from yourname.[a-z].bg and you cannot register viagra.a.bg it got to be your real name(you can if your name is Viagra :D )
2. If you want to register company name. google.bg for example, you have to provide official registration papers for the company
3. There isn`t even one single spam or other related issue with
4. Individuals cannot register
It is in some way very restrictive and the bureaucracy is a big pain, but the country domain name is important and if someone is misusing it everyone blame the country.
Any safer and it'd be the death penalty (Score:4, Insightful)
3. There isn`t even one single spam or other related issue with .bg domain, if someone try to use it for illegal purpuses register.bg will wipe the domain and file official complain to the police.
So, your website gets hacked and a page is uploaded which delivers malware to visitors. It wasn't your fault, you've kept it patched and backup the logs, but the hackers had a 0-day in their toolkit.
So now YOU lose your domain and go to jail? Nice system you got there.
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host your website off a windows machine with your webserver running as admin and it IS your fault that you got hacked.
if computer owners were held liable for negligence when their machine participates in DDOS then maybe people would take computer and information security seriously
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So I guess the band Via Gra should be fine, then...
Handy malware domains lists (Score:5, Informative)
I work in online advertising, specifically I look after a major UK publisher's adservers/ad-delivery. We use the following to keep an eye on identified malware delivering domains:
http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/mdl.php [malwaredomainlist.com]
http://www.malwaredomains.com/ [malwaredomains.com]
http://www.malwareurl.com/ [malwareurl.com]
http://www.anti-malvertising.com/ [anti-malvertising.com]
What we need is a totally free internet (Score:2)
Enough is enough!
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You mean like FidoNet or Usenet? That's not working out so great. Usenet became absorbed into the "evil" internet, and FidoNet is just about dead.
So you're telling me that.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Spammers use throwaway domains (Score:5, Insightful)
It is more expensive to register domains on a "premium" TLD. Since fewer domains are registered on the TLDs, there will be fewer used by spammers.
Because people black list domains used by spammers; URI-based blacklists, and RHS blacklists that blacklist by domain name. Spam filters start to recognize them, in any case.
So spammers register thousands of domains at the cheapest prices available (probably using stolen cards or multiple shell companies)
It follows, that spam might be reduced, with greater costs or qualifications to register a domain.
I for one would be in favor of a "paper" requirement.
ICANN should require that every domain have a primary 'contact address' verified by the registrar that is listed in public WHOIS.
ICANN should require registrars to verify BY PAPER certified+restricted mail to each new primary contact address, which must be an address in a country the registrar does business in, and may not be a PO Box or forwarded address.
The registrant should be required to SIGN a document mailed, and send it back, before the domain can be placed in the zone. And the signature must match the signature on the mail slip.
The slip signed must include a statement agreeing to the ICANN policies, and certifying that the signer is the principal, and the address provided belongs to the principal who owns the domain, and not a proxy, agent, or designee.
And from then on, that 'contact information' can be used by the owner of THAT account to designate as the org contact for domains registered or transferred. Using a different contact for a domain, requiring going through verification again.
For a minor inconvenience, spammers could be stopped.
Nice try (Score:2)
Re:Nice try (Score:4, Insightful)
Which they aren't doing already?
Just because one approach wouldn't stop all forms of spam, doesn't mean it couldn't significantly impact spam overall by eliminating one or more vectors.
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They already do, but there are a finite relatively small number of servers that they can easily rootkit, and once those are blacklisted, they're blacklisted.
It might not be perfect, but it makes things much harder, for spammers: using totally fake information and stolen CCs to register domains becomes especially hard, since they now need a fraudulent physical address they can take mail at, risks of getting caught are higher, and
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Someone needs to post that checklist of why that won't work.
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That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me. As it is today, it can take up to 10 days to complete a registrar change.
I am using Melbourne IT as my registrar because my hosting provider works well with them. Certified mail to and from another country would take upwards of two weeks -- and all that time my client is waiting.
I completely understand the eagerness to deny spammers and malware fi
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That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me.
The registrar is responsible for registering the domain and has nothing whatsoever to do with design or hosting.
Minor inconvenience? More like PITA. (Score:2)
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Seriously, you make buying a domain name sound WORSE than going to the DMV. First off, what's the point of having employees if the principal can't delegate responsibilities such as picking up certified mail and signing for it,
The registry could offer some flexibility in regards to the PO Box rule by offering another option: have a statement signed by two different witnesses and notarized.
The registrar would be required to verify the notarization, and provide a publicly viewable scan of the document, w
Risk of WHAT? (Score:3, Insightful)
Risk of what? Risk of "falling in" and coming out of your trance 3 hours later with 20 new browser tabs open? tvtropes and wikipedia are both .orgs, so I bet .org is the riskiest TLD.
It's pretty funny: even if you RTFA it doesn't really say what the risk is. The fact that they quote McAfee implies that they're talking about a risk of Windows users deciding to download and install malware from websites, but this isn't actually stated.
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If they're talking about computer viruses. just don't install the things. It's not that difficult to not install a virus.
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Risk of "falling in" and coming out of your trance 3 hours later with 20 new browser tabs open? tvtropes and wikipedia are both .orgs, so I bet .org is the riskiest TLD.
This is true, I visited tvtropes one Saturday afternoon; when I regained consciousness it was Wednesday, I was naked and there were three dead hookers in the basement.
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Don't forget slashdot.org and the risk of serious productivity loss.
Surely (Score:3, Interesting)
I would of thought .gov would be the safest domain.
Re:Surely (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding? Visit irs.gov and a third of your income vanishs.
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Unless you're really rich
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I would of thought .gov would be the safest domain.
Not so much. [google.com]
California local government sites were regular victims (I ran into this [calecia.com] one). I suspect the brief deletion of ca.gov [networkworld.com] was frustration and not so inadvertent.
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$50 on Credit Cards Is Major (Score:2)
In credit cards, charges over $50 are in a different category. Typically the cardholder is responsible for $50 and less, so those charges aren't screened by the credit corp as much since the credit corp isn't liable. This is why frauds usually charge under $50, even if just testing for a larger hit or assembling small (under $50) charges into a big charge.
So charging over $50, like TRAVEL and .jp do, would screen out some fraudulent charges on stolen card numbers.
We need onetime passwords instead of sharing
Higher Prices = More likely to notice your CC bill (Score:2)
Atm I have 1 charge on my CC, its for .... actually I wont say, thats a helpful bit of security info there! But anyway, if it went up by £9.99 - common price for .COM domain over here - I'd likely not notice....
However, if it suddenly rose by £89.99, I'd surely notice.
Or did we forget that malware works by NOT being noticed. These people are experts at staying hidden.
Tealeaf statistics, retarded summary (Score:3, Insightful)
With a massive and diverse category like a top-level domain, the only statement you can make is "56% of malicious domains are .com"
Concluding, from this, that ".com is the riskiest domain" is like saying "people with long hair are the least likely to murder you" based on how many murders are committed by people with long hair. Actually, it fails on two counts: Firstly, 56% of malicious domains end in .com because most domains do. A better measure would be the relative percentage of malicious domains for a given TLD.
Even that statistic would only say anything about "risk" if you randomly picked a domain under the .com TLD (with perfectly equal chances for each). People don't use the internet like that; they use it by following links from popular sites to other popular sites. One of those neat little obvious-in-hindsight discoveries; there was a small search engine who made it big by using that.
I worry about the most dangerous domains... (Score:2)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a call coming in from Vivian Schiller, and then I need to get ready for my daily news report for NPR.
TLD = Laughable Metric of "Dangerousness" (Score:2)
.COM has more abandoned domains (Score:1)
Goatse.com (Score:2)
Surprisingly safe!
Dont come to us with bullshit articles (Score:2)
this is the second time some bull was served to us on slashdot based on ridiculous statistics in 2 days' time.
Even weirder... (Score:1)
FTFA:
It (sic) August, McAfee released its report on the Top 10 Most Dangerous Celebrities online in which Cameron Diaz took the top spot.
Yeah, keep us posted on those dangerous celebs, McAfee. Not only are they diluting the value of your entertainment dollar, they're also after your lolcat collection! The problem's so monumental, we can't even take the time to proofread our blurbs!
There's your metric on whether this article should be taken seriously or not, /. .
I work for a hosting company and noticed... (Score:2)
If it's minor they tend to shrug it oas soemthing trivial they did, but larger purchases grab their attention.
What really surprises me is how long some people will let a $9.95/mo. charge sit on their acct. before they take action and investigate it... in quite a few cases it's YEARS. I also noticed that a fraudster will tend to use a stolen card to register one o
Banking on Ignorance (Score:1)
And (Score:1)
Hence it is safe to use Japanese DNS
http://aruljohn.com/track.pl?host=210.134.143.7 [aruljohn.com]