The Interisle company engaged in the cybersecurity research has published another Phishing Landscape annual report. It is based on the phishing attacks information from the organizations comprising the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank and Spamhaus, and sums up about 4 million reports on phishing from May 2024 to April 2025.
Over this period, the number of the domain names associated with phishing has grown by 38% compared to the same period a year before. The share of phishing in the .COM/.NET generic domains and national domain zones has decreased from 37% to 32% and from 15% to 11% , respectively. Meanwhile, new generic top-level domains show an extremely negative trend. In 2021, they accounted for 9% of all domain names registered worldwide and 21% of the domains associated with phishing. Since then, the market share of new domains has grown to only 11%, while their share in phishing has grown to 51%.
Although in absolute terms .COM domain with 455, 297 phishing complaints naturally remains in the lead, it can only be explained by its absolute leadership in the market to outstrip all its competitors by the number of registrations. Yet, if we examine the ratio of the total number of registered names to the number of names associated with phishing, the picture is quite different—and extremely disappointing. For instance, the .XIN domain had 42, 724 names and 42, 681 out of them were mentioned in the phishing complaints as of the report preparation time. It means that the domain zone phishing level has practically achieved 100% . Almost similar indicators are observed in the .BOND, .CFD, .TODAY, and .LOL domain zones.
As for the registrars, NiceNic, Aceville, Dominet, Webnic and OwnRegistrar show the greatest share of phishing registrations. Still, the name registration price remains the main lure for phishing organizers year on year. The lower is the price, the greater is the probability that the domain will be registered for unfair purposes.
