New gTLD phishing still tiny, but .xyz sees most of it

New gTLDs are not yet being widely used to carry out phishing runs, but most such attacks are concentrated in .xyz.
That’s one of the conclusions of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which today published its report for the second half of 2014.
Phishing was basically flat in the second half of the year, with 123,972 recorded attacks.
The number of domains used to phish was 95,321, up 8.4% from the first half of the year.
However, the number of domains that were registered maliciously in order to phish (as opposed to compromised domains) was up sharply — by 20% to 27,253 names.
In the period, 272 TLDs were used, but almost 54% of the attacks used .com domains. In terms of maliciously registered domains, .com fared worse, with over 62% share.
According to APWG, 75% of maliciously registered domains were in .com, .tk, .pw, .cf and .net.
Both .tk and .cf are Freenom-administered free ccTLDs (for Tokelau and the Central African Republic) while low-cost .pw — “plagued” by Chinese phishers — is run by Radix for Palau.
New gTLDs accounted for just 335 of the maliciously registered domains — 1.2% of the total.
That’s about half of what you’d expect given new gTLDs’ share of the overall domain name industry.
Twenty-four new gTLDs had malicious registrations, but .xyz saw most of them. APWG said:

Almost two-thirds of the phishing in the new gTLDs — 288 domains — was concentrated in the .XYZ registry. (Of the 335 maliciously registered domains, 274 were in .XYZ.) This is the first example of malicious registrations clustering in one new gTLD, and we are seeing more examples in early 2015.

XYZ.com aggressively promoted cheap or free .xyz names during the period, but APWG said that only four .xyz phishing names were registered via freebie partner Network Solutions.
In fact, APWG found that most of its phishing names were registered via Xin Net and used to attack Chinese brands.
But, normalizing the numbers to take account of different market shares, .xyz shapes up poorly when compared to .com and other TLDs, in terms of maliciously registered domains. APWG said:

XYZ had a phishing-per-10,000-domains score of 3.6, which was just slightly above the average of 3.4 for all TLDs, and lower than .COM’s score of 4.7. Since most phishing domains in .XYZ were fraudulently registered and most in .COM compromised, .XYZ had a significantly higher incidence of malicious domain registrations per 10,000 coming in at 3.4 versus 1.4 for .COM.

APWG said that it expects the amount of phishing to increase in new gTLDs as registries, finding themselves in a crowded marketplace, compete aggressively on price.
It also noted that the amount of non-phishing abuse in new gTLDs is “much higher” than the phishing numbers would suggest:

Tens of thousands of domains in the new gTLDs are being consumed by spammers, and are being blocklisted by providers such as Spamhaus and SURBL. So while relatively few new gTLD domains have been used for phishing, the total number of them being used maliciously is much higher.

The number of maliciously registered domains containing a variation on the targeted brand was more or less flat, up from 6.6% to 6.8%.
APWG found that 84% of all phishing attacks target Chinese brands and Chinese internet users.
The APWG report can be downloaded here.
UPDATE: XYZ.com CEO Daniel Negari responded to the report by pointing out that phishing attacks using .xyz have a much shorter duration compared to other TLDs, including .com.
According to the APWG report, the average uptime of an attack using .xyz is just shy of 12 hours, compared to almost 28 hours in .com. The median uptime was a little over six hours in .xyz, compared to 10 hours in .com.
Negari said that this was due to the registry’s “aggressive detection and takedowns”. He said XYZ has three full-time employees devoted to handling abuse.

.tk registrar gets ICANN breach notice

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

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

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.