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.tk registrar gets ICANN breach notice

Kevin Murphy, March 19, 2015, Domain Registrars

OpenTLD, the registrar owned by .tk registry Freenon, has received an odd contract-breach notice from ICANN.
The company apparently forgot to send ICANN a Compliance Certificate for 2014, despite repeated pestering by ICANN staff.
It’s the first time I’ve seen ICANN issue a breach notice (pdf) for this reason.
A Compliance Certificate, judging by the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, seems to be a simple form letter that the CEO must fill in, sign and submit once a year.
Coming back into compliance would be, one imagines, five minutes’ work.
As well as being an ICANN-accredited registrar, OpenTLD is part of Freenom. That’s the registry that repurposes under-used ccTLDs with a “freemium” model that allows free registrations.
Its flagship, .tk, is the biggest ccTLD in world, with over 30 million active names.

Freenom adds .gq to free African ccTLD roster

Kevin Murphy, October 2, 2014, Domain Registries

Freenom has struck a deal with registry for the once-dormant ccTLD for Equatorial Guinea to offer .gq domain names for free worldwide.
The ccTLD is the latest from Africa to buy into the company’s free domains model, after .cf (Central African Republic), .ml (Mali) and .ga (Gabon).
The local registry for Equatorial Guinea is telecom provider GETESA
Netherlands-based Freenom is best-known for .tk, which with over 26 million names is the second-largest TLD after .com, despite ostensibly representing the 1,500 inhabitants of tiny Pacific island Tokelau.
Funded to the tune of $3 million last December, the company makes its money by monetizing the residual traffic from expired and deleted domains in the zones it manages, as well as add-on services.
.gq is currently in sunrise and expects to go live with general availability December 1.
A recent Anti-Phishing Working Group report found that Freenom’s ccTLDs are much more likely to host phishing attacks, relative to their size.
Equatorial Guinea is a small country, with just over 650,000 citizens. While ostensibly oil-rich, most of its inhabitants suffer from truly shocking poverty, human rights and infant mortality rates.

Phishers prefer free ccTLDs to new gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, September 29, 2014, Domain Registries

Domains in free and cheap ccTLDs are much more likely to host phishing attacks than new gTLDs.
That’s one of the conclusions of the latest report of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which found that Freenom’s re-purposed African ccTLDs were particularly risky.
The first-half 2014 report found 22,679 “maliciously registered” domains used in phishing attacks. That’s flat on the second half of 2013 and almost double the first half of 2013.
Only roughly a quarter of the domains used in phishing had been registered for the purpose. The rest were pointing to compromised web servers.
On new gTLDs, the APWG said:

As of this writing, the new gTLD program has not resulted in a bonanza of phishing. A few phishers experimented with new gTLD domain names, perhaps to see if anyone noticed. But most of the new gTLD domains that were used for phishing were actually on compromised web sites.

The new gTLDs .agency, .center, .club, .email and .tips were the only ones to see any maliciously registered phishing domains in the half — each had one — according to the report.
The APWG speculates quite reasonably that the relatively high price of most new gTLD domains has kept phishers away but warns that this could change as competition pushes prices down.
While .com hosts 54% of all phishing domains, small ccTLDs that give away domains for free or cheap are disproportionately likely to have such domains in their zones, the report reveals.
The Freenom-operated ccTLDs .cf (Central African Republic), .ml (Mali) and .ga (Gabon) top the table of most-polluted TLDs, alongside PW Registry’s .pw (Palau).
Freenom, which also runs .tk, offers free domains, while PW Registry has a very low registry fee.
APWG measures the risk of phishing by TLD by counting phishing domains per 10,000 registered names, where the median score is 4.7 and .com’s score is 4.1.
.cf tops the charts with 320.8, followed by .ml with 118.9, .pw with 122, .ga with 42,9 and .th (Thailand) with 27.5. These number include compromised as well as phisher-registered domains.
Read the APWG report here.