Late last year auDA, the administrator of Australia’s .au top level domain, reported that the au domain name space only had 0.04 percent of its domain names that was involved in a security threat, compared to the global average of other ccTLD that represented 0.25 percent.
From the 3,066,719 domain names assessed, there were 1,308 domains listed with at least one security threat. Of the abuse that did occur in .au, phishing attempts made up the majority. As a percentage, this was higher compared with gTLDs, which recorded more spam and malware threats.
The DAAR Report
The report is developed by ICANN and identifies four types of security threats:
- phishing;
- malware;
- botnet command-and-control; and
- spam.
The information is extracted from the DAAR system that analyses security threat activity and domain abuse behaviour across registries and generates monthly reports
This is intended to assist anti-abuse efforts, inform policy discussion, and support consumer confidence and trust.
Why is the .au space safer than others?
AuDA highlights that abuse rates overall are lower in .au because we collect much more official information on registrants that requires them to meet specific policy requirements, including:
- registrant legal name;
- registrant ID;
- eligibility type;
- eligibility name;
- eligibility ID; and
- policy reason.
Also, unlike other spaces where Registrants can hide their information, the .au WHOIS record is publicly recorded allowing consumers more visibility of who they are dealing with.
AuDA is also proactive in ensuring that current policy maximises safety for consumers and recently tightened up eligibility of domain name registrations to limit behaviours that could threaten Australian brands. See the latest policy updates here.
About brandsec
Brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that look after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.
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Source: https://www.auda.org.au/blog/au-domain-abuse-well-below-global-average