How likely is a domain to be malicious? Here's a look at the stats and graphs that help us decide.

Happy New Year!

The landscape of security threats widened significantly in 2012. Each day, OpenDNS now blocks 80,000,000 requests to botnet, malware or phishing domains across the globe. 

Below you’ll find a demonstration of the densities of malicious domains in contrast with sampled benign domains at an aggregated level. The data is sorted by geo locations, TLDs, ASNs and a number of other domain attributes. 

TOP 30 COUNTRIES

The United States (US), Germany (DE) and China (CN) are still the top three countries where the most malicious sites are hosted via the IP and network details. Countries are sorted by the total number of malicious sites in descending order. One interesting note, is that a number of countries are hosting significantly more malicious sites than benign sites, including Korea (KR), Philippines (PH), Moldova (MD), Panama (PA) and Antarctica (AQ).

TOP 30 TLDs

Not surprisingly, .ru, .cc and .cn are the most notorious TLDs for malicious domains. TLDs are sorted by the total number of hosted malicious sites in descending order. From the data, we can make the deduction that domains of .ms, .com.co, and .am are much more likely to be malicious than domains with a .fr.  

TOP 30 ASNs

The top 30 ASNs shown below are sorted by the absolute number of malicious sites they host. There are a number of ASNs that are almost completely dedicated to serving malicious traffic. 

Lastly, in the following plot we show the statistical likelihood of a domain being malicious vs. benign according to a number of other attributes of a domain: 1) how many IPs a domain resolves to; 2) number of different countries a domain’s IP is located in; 3) the string length of a domain name; 4-6) the minimum, mean and maximum TTL of a domain; 7) & 9) the lexical perplexity of a domain name and its entropy; 8) the number of times a domain’s IP changed over a 24 days period; 10) the age of a domain.

 

 

OpenDNS has processed 41 trillion DNS requests since OpenDNS started protecting its users in 2006, and we block 80+ million requests to botnet, malware or phishing domains daily for both OpenDNS users and Umbrella customers. 

We’re looking forward to another terrific year ahead of us.