ICANN Sends Warning Letter to TOP Domain Registrar Jiangsu Bangning for Failing to Effectively Control Hackers and Phishing Domains

The .top domain is an approved internet top-level domain, whose applicant & registrar is Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd. This company is the direct management and operational institution for the .top domain.

On July 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sent a letter to Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology, accusing the company of failing to respond to reports of phishing attacks involving .top domains.

There are a large number of phishing websites on the internet, usually constructed by hackers and scam gangs. When security organizations discover phishing websites, they submit feedback to ICANN or the top-level domain registrar. Registrars have the authority to suspend these abused domains according to domain agreements.

ICANN's action of sending a letter directly to the domain management institution, Bangning Technology, is extremely rare. ICANN stated: Based on information and records collected over several weeks, we determined that the .top registrar has not developed a process to investigate and handle reports of domain abuse in a timely, comprehensive, and reasonable manner.

Data shows that .top has become the second-largest domain for phishing websites, second only to COM. Hackers and scam gangs commonly use .top domains to build phishing sites. A research report released by consulting group Interisle shows that there were 2 million phishing attacks last year, with .top domains accounting for 4% of them.

Notably, there are currently 2.76 million .top domains, of which 117,000 were identified as phishing domains last year, equivalent to one-third of COM phishing domains, which reached 379,000.

A comparative analysis reveals a problem: COM phishing domains constitute only 0.24% of all COM domains, while .top phishing domains make up 4.2% of all .top domains. This indicates that if Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology does not implement strict control policies, the misuse rate of .top domains could continue to soar, posing immeasurable potential harm.

The reason hackers and scam gangs favor .top domains is straightforward: these domains are very cheap to register, and the registrar's control is not strict, allowing registered domains to be used for a considerable time before being blocked.