Blue Coat reveals web’s shadiest neighborhoods

NEW DELHI: Over 95 percent of websites in 10 different Top-Level Domains (TLDs) are rated as suspicious, with that percentage increasing to 100 percent for the top two highest ranking TLDs, enterprise security solutions provider Blue Coat Systems revealed in its new research for consumers and businesses.

Blue Coat analyzed hundreds of millions of web requests from more than 15,000 businesses and 75 million users to create “The Web’s Shadiest Neighborhoods,” a new report that combines research with tips and tricks for web users and enterprise security and IT departments looking to avoid viruses and other malicious activity.

“Due to the explosion of TLDs in recent years, we have seen a staggering number of almost entirely shady web neighborhoods crop up at an alarming rate,” said Dr. Hugh Thompson, CTO for Blue Coat Systems. “The increase in Shady TLDs as revealed by Blue Coat’s analysis is in turn providing increased opportunity for the bad guys to partake in malicious activity. In order to build a better security posture, knowledge about which sites are the most suspicious, and how to avoid them, is essential for consumers and businesses alike.”

For this research, Blue Coat counted a domain as shady if it was heavily associated with spam, malware or phishing. Domains in the database that were not classified in one of these ways were counted as “non-shady.”

Much has changed since the early days of the Internet when the web had only six common top level domains (TLDs). Back then, what most consumers and businesses encountered were a small number of standard TLDs, such as .com, .net, .edu and .gov, as well as some “country code” domains like .fr (France), and .jp (Japan).

However, since 2013, the number of new TLDs has skyrocketed. There has been an explosion of new neighborhoods on the web, many of which may be considered for web security purposes as neither safe nor friendly. By June 2015, the count of validly issued TLDs stood at over one thousand. As the number of TLDs has increased, so have the opportunities for attackers.

The report also reveals examples of nefarious activity taking place on shady websites of some of the top ranked Shady TLDs, including the fourth most seemingly dangerous neighborhood, .kim. Blue Coat researchers recently discovered websites serving up pages, which mimic popular video and image sites and prompt unprotected visitors to unwittingly download malware.