ICANN publishes report on DNS abuse in gTLDs

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has published a report titled ‘Statistical Analysis of DNS Abuse in gTLDs’, which measured rates of common forms of abusive activities in the domain name system (DNS), such as spam, phishing, and malware distribution. The study compared rates of such activities between new and legacy generic top-level domains (gTLDs), and measured the effects of DNS security extensions (DNSSEC), domain parking, and registration restrictions on abuse rates using historical data covering the first three years of the New gTLD Program (2014 – 2016). Some of the main findings of the report included: there seem to be more hacked domains in legacy gTLDs, and more maliciously registered domains in new gTLDs; rates of phishing and malware domains in new gTLDs appear to be lower than in legacy gTLDs; registration restrictions appear to have an impact on reduced abuse rates.