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Namecheap saw 116,000 phishing attacks last year

Kevin Murphy, April 14, 2026, 09:24:34 (UTC), Domain Registrars

Bad guys used Namecheap to register domains associated with over 116,000 confirmed phishing attacks in 2025, according to data released by the company this week.

Across Namecheap and sister registrar Spaceship there were 432,796 reports of phishing and 116,871 of them were confirmed to be phishing attacks, according to data shared to an ICANN policy mailing list.

The stats refer to the number of tickets in the registrars’ support system, not the number of abusive domains, which logically could be lower due to double-counting or higher due to multiple domains listed in the same ticket.

The numbers are low as a percentage of the company’s domains under management — it has over 27 million DUM across its accreditations — at less than half of one percent, but pretty steep in absolute numbers.

The data was shared as part of early-stage discussions about the next wave of ICANN policy on DNS abuse.

A community working group is working on potential new rules for registrars, forcing them to conduct “Associated Domain Checks”.

That’s the idea that when a registrar confirms a domain is abusive they should check the Bad Guy’s other domains for similar abuse and yank those too, particularly if they were part of a bulk registration.

One of the many factors playing into these policy discussions is the administrative burden, and cost, that this would place on registrars. With 116,000 confirmed cases of abuse, the work-hours for abuse staff (or a potentially unreliable AI) quickly adds up.

Namecheap was named in the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s Q4 2025 report as the number one registrar abused in business email compromise attacks, a subset of phishing, with 25% of the total.


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