Research Spotlight: Enabling Evil for Pocket Change
Summary: Cisco Talos tested a hypothesis that domains priced at $1 or less would see more registrations and more malicious activity, after receiving an email advertising deeply discounted TLDs from Namecheap. The sale ran 50 days through 31 March instead of ending 10 March as advertised, offered unlimited quantities at 88 cents, free WhoisGuard privacy for new registrations and transfers, SSL certificates for $1.99, and 16 additional TLDs beyond the eight in the email. Across the 80-day span of sales from Alpnames and Namecheap, Talos counted 10,605 unique auto-convicted malware samples.
What's compelling: Domains registered with WhoisGuard privacy rose about 58% during the sale, and the .top TLD nearly doubled its appearances in Talos spam and virus telemetry - cheap registration plus free identity masking is the combination that puts attacker infrastructure in front of your users.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- Malware
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