SpamHaus, an international public organization, which unites those fighting spam mailings, released its 2017 report. According to the document, last year organization’s specialists discovered almost 50 thousand domains registered to control botnets to send out spam messages. The “progress” is even more impressive when you consider that in 2014 there were only 3793 of such names detected.
The leader in absolute numbers is obviously .COM, where 14,218 domains used as command and control servers for botnets were discovered. However, this is only so because .COM domain is an absolute leader by the number of registered names; it is very far ahead other domain zones. When you look at the ratio between names registered to send spam and total number of names, the picture changes. For example, there are around 131 thousand names registered in a new domain .CLICK, and 1256 of them according to SpamHaus are C&C servers for botnets. Therefore, around 1% of all names in the domain zone are connected to spam mailings – this is the highest percentage discovered. High values were also discovered in domains .WORK, .SPACE, .WEBSITE, .TOP, .PRO, .BIZ, .INFO, .XYZ, .BID and .ONLINE.
When it comes to registrars that spammers use most often, it is Namecheap that leads with a large margin. It’s noteworthy that in this case the law of large numbers didn’t work: the largest registrar in the world GoDaddy is not on the top 20 list. Domain Incite explains the situation by saying that the company has specific staff members whose immediate duty is to monitor potential unfair usage of registered names.
