The Interisle Consulting Group has published a paper looking at the phishing landscape in 2023, KrebsOnSecurity reports. Notably, Interisle found that the .us top-level domain is being widely abused in phishing attacks.
“.US is the ccTLD of the United States and had a very large number of its domains used for phishing -- almost 30,000 domains, more than 20,000 of which were registered maliciously by phishers,” Interisle said.
These phishing domains were used in a wide variety of attacks against targets in the US and around the world.
“Ironically, at least 109 of the .US domains in our data were used to attack the United States government, specifically the United States Postal Service and its customers,” Interisle said. “Significant numbers of .US domains were also registered to attack some of the United States’ most prominent companies, including Bank of America, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, AT&T, Citi, Comcast, and Target. .US domains were also used to attack foreign government operations: six .US domains were used to attack Australian government services, six attacked Great Britain’s Royal Mail, one attacked Canada Post, and one attacked the Denmark Tax Authority.”
Dean Marks, emeritus executive director for the Coalition for Online Accountability, told Krebs that the .us domain should be more strictly regulated.
“Even very large ccTLDs, like .de for Germany — which has a far larger market share of domain name registrations than .US — have very low levels of abuse, including phishing and malware,” Marks said. “In my view, this situation with .US should not be acceptable to the U.S. government overall, nor to the US public.”
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