CENTR published the results of its study, which aimed to establish how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic affects the DNS. The main concern of many observers is certainly the registration of coronavirus-related domain names, many of which are used in the future to spread fake information or fraudulent activities. CENTR researchers analyzed registrations in a group of 12 ccTLDs (including .RU) from January to March this year and found that during this period 6,164 domain names using the words covid, corona or virus were registered in them. Most of the registrations occurred in the second half of March.
At the same time, about 751,000 new names were registered in this group of 12 ccTLDs over this period. Thus, the share of coronavirus-related registrations amounted to approximately 0.8% of the total number. In addition, only 26% of such domains were then used to create sites (without assessing the possible harmfulness of their content). Consequently, it would be a real exaggeration to say that the world was hit by a wave of malicious registrations and internet fraud associated with the pandemic.
Another issue is the increased pressure on the domain system, due to the fact that almost the whole world has switched to remote work with more active use of the internet. However, this concern does not have any serious grounds. The CENTR study emphasizes that the distributed DNS infrastructure with data caching at various levels to speed up response times virtually eliminates the overload of top-level DNS servers. Although the number of DNS requests has increased, it does not even come close to critical values. In general, CENTR estimates the current load on the DNS infrastructure of European ccTLDs at about 10%. Therefore, even a ten-time increase in traffic will not create any noticeable problems. To briefly summarize the study, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has not had any serious impact on the domain system to date.
