The Freename Forum

DNS Belgium, registry of the Belgian country code extension .be, has published an international study on phishing in country code top level domains (ccTLDs). Together with the Dutch SIDN and the Irish IE Domain Registry Limited, more than 28,000 .be, .nl and .ie domains involved in phishing were analysed. The study revealed that the most frequently counterfeited companies in the three ccTLDs analysed were not based in Belgium, the Netherlands or Ireland. It also revealed that 80 per cent of phishing attacks use compromised websites and domains that are not newly registered. This choice could also have financial reasons; it is cheaper to use an existing domain for fraudulent activities than to register a new domain - including the associated hosting costs. In their phishing attacks, cyber criminals prefer to impersonate banks, financial institutions and large IT companies. Microsoft is the most frequently affected in this respect; the domains of Microsoft, Google, Netflix and PayPal were used in up to 58 per cent of all phishing attacks in the three ccTLDs investigated. The entire study can now be downloaded free of charge.

You can find the DNS Belgium phishing study at:
https://www.dnsbelgium.be/en/news/inter ... ing-cctlds