ICANN has posted on its official website a report analyzing domain name registrations potentially associated with the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Domain Name System Security Threat Information Collection and Reporting (DNSTICR) project. The document states that between the beginning of 2020 and August 2021, 323,956 domain names were registered using one or more keywords associated with the pandemic – such as “covid,” “mask,” “virus,” “corona,” “vaccine,” etc. Registrations increased sharply in late March and peaked in April, when an average of 2,951 such names were registered daily.
Later the trend began to decline, and the number of these registrations approached the background figures. For instance, only 5,979 such names were registered in July of this year, compared to 26,652 in July 2020. When it comes to keywords, “covid” remains the leader, followed by “mask” and “corona”; however, the number of registrations using these terms has significantly decreased over the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, domain registrations using the word “vaccine” surged in late 2020 and early 2021. This is easily explained by the fact that the United States began its mass vaccination campaign during this period.
An important conclusion is that the worst fears associated with the widespread use of “pandemic” domain names for illegal purposes have not come true. Of course, there are cases of fraud and the spread of spam, malware and inaccurate information from sites in such domains, and they are not isolated. However, most domains are parked or do not respond to DNS queries at all. Estimates of domain name malice fluctuate depending on the number and reliability of reports of illegal activity associated with a particular domain. But one way or another, the number of malicious pandemic-related names account for 1.8% to 6.1% of all registered names.
