The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published its annual report for 2017. The watchdog has been combating online child sexual abuse materials. Last year, the experts found such content on 78,589 URLs on 3,791 domains in 152 domain zones. It isn’t hard to guess that the domain zone .COM was the most popular resource for posting unlawful content, accounting for more than 50 percent of the abusive URLs. Also in the top five domain zones that included URLs with child sexual abuse materials were .NET, .ORG, .CO, and, unfortunately, .RU.
The new generic top-level domains accounted for only 5,000 abusive URLs, up 221 percent on 2016. The proportion looks different though. The URLs spreading child sexual abuse content were located across 1,063 domains in 50 different new gTLDs. This makes up 28 percent of the total number of domain names on the IWF report. The fact that new gTLDs account for a little more than 6 percent of all the names makes it obvious that childhood pornography spreaders have been showing intense interest in new gTLDs.
