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New Russian TLD is a smash hit

Kevin Murphy, November 11, 2010, Domain Registries

Russia’s new Cyrillic top-level domain, .РФ, has gone down a storm, beating even the recent launch of .co in terms of the speed of first-day registrations.
The Russian registry is reporting that it broke through the 200,000 domains mark within the first six hours, after it opened its doors at noon local time today.
By my calculations, that’s less than half the time it took .co to hit the same benchmark, despite the fact that .co did not have the same residency requirements as .РФ.
Andrei Kolesnikov, director of the CCTLD Coordination Center, which runs the domain, told the GNSO Council mailing list:

This clearly demonstrates a great demand for domains in national languages and proves Russia’s position as a leader in terms of the dynamic of TLD launch.

There were already 18,000 .РФ domains before the floodgates opened this afternoon, following a sunrise period for trademark owners.
The TLD transliterates as .rf, for Russian Federation. The country has 142 million citizens and is believed to have almost 60 million internet users. The .ru namespace has about three million domains.

Russian domain crackdown halves phishing attacks

Kevin Murphy, August 20, 2010, Domain Tech

Phishing attacks from .ru domains dropped by almost half in the second quarter, after tighter registration rules were brought in, according to new research.
Attacks from the Russian ccTLD namespace fell to 528, compared to 1,020 during the first quarter, according to Internet Identity’s latest report.
IID attributed the decline to the newly instituted requirement for all registrants to provide identifying documents or have their domains cancelled, which came into effect on April 1.
The report goes on to say:

Following a similar move by the China Internet Network Information Center in December 2009, spam researchers suggested that this tactic only moves the criminals to a new neighborhood on the Internet, but has no real impact on solving the problem.

I wonder whose ccTLD is going to be next.
The IID report also highlights a DNS redirection attack that took place in June in Israel, which I completely missed at the time.
Apparently, major brands including Microsoft and Coca-Cola started displaying pro-Palestine material on their .co.il web sites, for about nine hours, after hackers broke into their registrar accounts at Communigal.