Blue Coat Systems has revealed new research for consumers and businesses that shows the Top-Level Domains (TLDs), or “neighborhoods,” most associated with suspicious websites.
Among the key findings in the report are that more than 95 percent of websites in 10 different TLDs are rated as suspicious, with that percentage increasing to 100 percent for the top two highest ranking TLDs, .zip and .review.
Blue Coat analyzed hundreds of millions of Web requests from more than 15,000 businesses and 75 million users to create “The Web’s Shadiest Neighborhoods,” a new report that combines research with tips and tricks for Web users and enterprise security and IT departments looking to avoid viruses and other malicious activity. For this research, Blue Coat counted a domain as “shady” if it was rated in its database with a category such as:
| Most Common Malicious Activity | Less Common Malicious Activity |
| Spam | Malware |
| Scam | Botnet |
| Suspicious | Phishing |
| Potentially Unwanted Software (PUS) |
Domains in the database that were not classified in one of these ways were counted as “non-shady.”
The Web’s Top 10 “TLDs with Shady Sites*”
| Rank | Top-Level Domain Name | Percentage of Shady Sites |
| 1 | .zip | 100.00% |
| 2 | .review | 100.00% |
| 3 | .country | 99.97% |
| 4 | .kim | 99.74% |
| 5 | .cricket | 99.57% |
| 6 | .science | 99.35% |
| 7 | .work | 98.20% |
| 8 | .party | 98.07% |
| 9 | .gq (Equatorial Guinea) | 97.68% |
| 10 | .link | 96.98% |
*As of August 15, 2015 – Percentages are based on categorizations of web sites actually visited by our 75 million users. A TLD having 100 percent shady sites correlates to sites categorized by Blue Coat.
