Spamhaus has released its traditional quarterly report on botnet controller activity in gTLDs for the third quarter of this year. The leader by a wide margin is .COM, which is abused the most by botnet command & control servers. Of course, there is nothing surprising here – after all, .COM is the largest domain zone by the number of registrations. However, it is alarming that over the past quarter the number of domains in .COM used by botnets increased by 90 percent compared to the second quarter.
In second place is .XYZ. Two newcomers were added to the Spamhaus list during this quarter: botnet controllers are paying more attention to the new domains .CLUB and .MONSTER and Colombia's ccTLD .CO, according to Online Domain. However, .NET saw the greatest growth at 355 percent in Q3. Unfortunately, two Russian domains also rank in the top 10 domain zones that attract the most botnet abuse: .RU sits in sixth place, and .SU comes in tenth.
