TY - GEN
T1 - A First Look at COVID-19 Domain Names
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2021
AU - Kawaoka, Ryo
AU - Chiba, Daiki
AU - Watanabe, Takuya
AU - Akiyama, Mitsuaki
AU - Mori, Tatsuya
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This work takes a first look at domain names related to COVID-19 (Cov19doms in short), using a large-scale registered Internet domain name database, which accounts for 260 M of distinct domain names registered for 1.6 K of distinct top-level domains. We extracted 167 K of Cov19doms that have been registered between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2020. We attempt to answer the following research questions through our measurement study: RQ1: Is the number of Cov19doms registrations correlated with the COVID-19 outbreaks?, RQ2: For what purpose do people register Cov19doms? Our chief findings are as follows: (1) Similar to the global COVID-19 pandemic observed around April 2020, the number of Cov19doms registrations also experienced the drastic growth, which, interestingly, pre-ceded the COVID-19 pandemic by about a month, (2) 70% of active Cov19doms websites with visible content provided useful information such as health, tools, or product sales related to COVID-19, and (3) non-negligible number of registered Cov19doms was used for malicious purposes. These findings imply that it has become more challenging to distinguish domain names registered for legitimate purposes from others and that it is crucial to pay close attention to how Cov19doms will be used/misused in the future.
AB - This work takes a first look at domain names related to COVID-19 (Cov19doms in short), using a large-scale registered Internet domain name database, which accounts for 260 M of distinct domain names registered for 1.6 K of distinct top-level domains. We extracted 167 K of Cov19doms that have been registered between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2020. We attempt to answer the following research questions through our measurement study: RQ1: Is the number of Cov19doms registrations correlated with the COVID-19 outbreaks?, RQ2: For what purpose do people register Cov19doms? Our chief findings are as follows: (1) Similar to the global COVID-19 pandemic observed around April 2020, the number of Cov19doms registrations also experienced the drastic growth, which, interestingly, pre-ceded the COVID-19 pandemic by about a month, (2) 70% of active Cov19doms websites with visible content provided useful information such as health, tools, or product sales related to COVID-19, and (3) non-negligible number of registered Cov19doms was used for malicious purposes. These findings imply that it has become more challenging to distinguish domain names registered for legitimate purposes from others and that it is crucial to pay close attention to how Cov19doms will be used/misused in the future.
KW - Blocklist
KW - COVID-19
KW - Domain names
KW - Phishing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107311012&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85107311012&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-72582-2_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85107311012
SN - 9783030725815
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 39
EP - 53
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 22nd International Conference, PAM 2021, Proceedings
A2 - Hohlfeld, Oliver
A2 - Lutu, Andra
A2 - Levin, Dave
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 29 March 2021 through 1 April 2021
ER -