The Internet is chuck full of malicious activity, but sometimes the difference between legitimate and illegitimate websites is so fine that it’s nigh impossible to discern the two. Well, we might be in luck; as it turns out, around 95 percent of the dangerous websites on the Internet can be identified by the top-level domains they use.
A study by Blue Coat reveals this fact after closely analyzing tens of millions of websites that their users have visited. Blue Coat’s database ranks websites on how secure they are, or how prone they are to containing malware. Basically, Blue Coat was able to see which sites were legitimate, while also seeing how many of them were your average hacking tool dedicated to infecting systems with malware, spyware, phishing attempts, and other threats.
Top-level domains, for those who might not be familiar with the term, refers to the ending of a website’s URL. For reference, endings like .com and .net are considered top-level domains. There are now a total of 1,054 top-level domains in existence now, but the majority of the dangerous domains account for less than 1 percent of all site registrations. Still, it never hurts to be cautious of the sites your employees access on your business’s Internet connection.
For your reference, here are the top ten domains cited as being threatening to its visitors:
- .zip: 100% threat, <1,000 domains
- .review: 100% threat, 45,304 domains
- .country: 99.97% threat, 5,442 domains
- .kim: 99.74% threat, 8,913 domains
- .cricket: 99.57% threat, 27,723 domains
- .science: 99.35% threat, 324,833 domains
- .work: 98.20% threat, 68,144 domains
- .party: 98.07% threat, 206,914 domains
- .gq (Equatorial Guinea): 97.68% threat, 69,437 domains
- .link: 96.98% threat, 150,595 domains
So, what’s the best way to keep your business’s infrastructure secure? A best practice is to integrate an enterprise-level firewall and antivirus solution, complete with spam blocking and web content filtering, that’s capable of blocking and eliminating potential threats. If there’s one thing that you should know with certainty, it’s that you shouldn’t have to rely on your employees to discern phishing scams and nasty spam messages from legitimate emails.
Therefore, if you truly want to ensure that your network is as strong as possible, you should contact Aspire at (469) 7-ASPIRE. We can inform you about the benefits of utilizing a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution, as well as best practices concerning data security, web browsing, and much more. In today’s business world, you can’t afford to take risks with your information security; and with us, you won’t.
