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Dangerous new extensions: Blue Coat isn’t quite right

As you might know, the past two years many new extensions were added on the Internet, the so called new gTLDs. A study by Blue Coat now warns about several of these new extensions. According to them, these extensions are dangerous because they engage in phishing or spam. However here are some thoughts before you decide, based on this study, to not register your domain under certain extensions on the basis of this study.

According to Blue Coat the most dangerous extension is the .zip extension. The reason that the .zip extension is at the top is because many malicious files have the file .zip extension. But that has nothing to do with a domain name. There is nothing unsafe on the .zip extension. It is now even more than probably the safest extension line because there is only one website: nic.zip and that points to a page that displays the Google Registry explanation of what they’re planning to do with .zip. There is no website accessible under .zip. So you can’t possibly say that it is an unsafe extension.

Another extension cited by Blue Coat is the .work extension. According to them, 98.20% of the names under this extension are unsafe. Research of Name Sentry indicates that .work is the “least reliable” new gTLD, with just under 6900 dangerous domain names (names that may be using phishing, contain viruses, is used by spammers,…). However, this is less than 10% of the total .work names. And 10% is still much, very much. But a big difference compared. to 98.20% which Blue Coat is adhering to.

Similar figures including .science which also ranks pretty bad according to NameSentry (15 671 suspect names of a total of 326 906 active .science names). But that is still less than 5%, while Blue Coat claims that 99.35% of those domain names are hazardous.

Blue Coat now gets comments from different angles, but don’t want commit they’re wrong yet. They keep saying you have to block .zip Where their reasoning is that there are no active websites include .zip, and that you therefore have to block until there are active sites. That is as absurd as their very first report; because that is to say that you block something that does not exist (block is completely useless, because it still does not exist).

Other parties have serious reservations about the statements of Blue Coat. If you need more information, you should definitely read the following articles: “Laughable security report labels Google Registry” shady“,”Blue Coat Explains .zip screw-up” and “Top 10 Shady Sites in New gTLDs Is Flawed as Unlaunched .Zip is # 1

October 2015
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