This is the second time in as many years that a lawsuit by Meta against a domain registrar has disrupted the phishing industry. “Some of them time out after 14 days, some do it after 30, and some keep them forever.”įreenom did not respond to requests for comment. “One of the things we don’t have visibility into is how each of the blocklists determine to remove a URL from their lists,” he said. Piscitello said it’s too soon to tell the full impact of the Freenom lawsuit, noting that Interisle’s sources of spam and phishing data all have different policies about when domains are removed from their block lists. The company publishes historical data sets quarterly, both on malware and phishing. Interisle collects data from 12 major blocklists for spam, malware, and phishing, and it receives phishing-specific data from Spamhaus, Phishtank, OpenPhish and the APWG Ecrime Exchange. “Responsible for over 60% of phishing domains reported in November 2022, Freenom’s percentage has dropped to under 15%.” “We’ve observed a significant decline in phishing domains reported in the Freenom commercialized ccTLDs in months surrounding the lawsuit,” Piscitello wrote on Mastodon. Interisle partner Dave Piscitello said something remarkable has happened in the months since the Meta lawsuit. Meta pointed to research from Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered in 2021 and again last year that the five ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up half of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers. “Even after receiving notices of infringement or phishing by its customers, Freenom continues to license new infringing domain names to those same customers.” “The five ccTLDs to which Freenom provides its services are the TLDs of choice for cybercriminals because Freenom provides free domain name registration services and shields its customers’ identity, even after being presented with evidence that the domain names are being used for illegal purposes,” Meta’s complaint charged. Meta withdrew its December 2022 lawsuit and re-filed it in March 2023. Meta initially asked a court to seal its case against Freenom, but that request was denied. And there are countless reports from Freenom users who’ve seen free domains removed from their control and forwarded to other websites.īy the time Meta initially filed its lawsuit in December 2022, Freenom was the source of well more than half of all new phishing domains coming from country-code top-level domains. tk for Tokelau.įreenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, but the registrar also reserves the right to take back free domains at any time, and to divert traffic to other sites - including adult websites. Image: Interisle Consulting.įreenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including. Since then, the organization has posted other articles on the tension between the United States and North Korea, but the threat level doesn't seem to have changed.The volume of phishing websites registered through Freenom dropped considerably since the registrar was sued by Meta. The latest report on the website shows that the DEFCON Warning System level was DEFCON level five, but that was back on Aug. It was then lowered back to five in June. For example, there are articles from April stating that the DEFCON Warning System level had risen to four after North Korea's missile tests that month. The group has been quoted by British tabloids like The Daily Star and Express saying that the DEFCON level has been raised in relation to North Korea. We will then issue a warning which the public can decide for themselves what to do about. Being private, there are a lot of caveats to take into consideration, which even they admit: Our system is designed to be a barometer which will (in theory) see nuclear war coming much earlier than the government will admit. The organization, like the military, has decided to use DEFCON levels to assess the nuclear threat to the country. So, one "private intelligence organization" called the DEFCON Warning System attempts to do it for you. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war" in response to President Trump's threats of "fire and fury like the world has never seen." But neither Trump's nor North Korea's hyperbolic language will tell you what the real threat level is. The North's Korean People's Army threatened to "turn the U.S. If you were to listen to only North Korea, it would sound like nuclear war here in North America is imminent.
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