The World's Most Abused Domain Registrars
Among the reasons spam, malware and other threats continue to plague the internet is that abusers find it easy to obtain an endless supply of domain names. Some gTLD and ccTLD resellers (called registrars) sell large volumes of domains to professional spammers and other miscreants for profit. Some registrars have been directly owned and operated by abusers, while others simply do not do enough to stop or limit bad guys' access to an unlimited supply of domains. Abusers destroy the reputation of those domains (and along with them, possibly the reputation of registrars and registries) and just move on to new ones in a vicious cycle.
A registrar may be "bad" in two ways. On one side, the ratio of bad to good domains may be higher than average, indicating that the registrar could do a better job of enforcing policies and shunning abusers. However, some registrars with a high fraction of bad domains may be quite small businesses, and their total number of bad domains could be relatively limited with respect to other registrars. Their total "badness" to the Internet is limited by their small total size.
The other side is that some large registrars may have a large number of bad domains as a result of the sheer size of their domain corpus. Even if their corrective measures are effective, they still constitute a problem on the global scale, and they could assign further resources to improve their anti-abuse processes and bring down the overall number of bad domains.
In defining a "badness" index, we decided to weight in both these factors. With a certain amount of arbitrariness—and at the same time a desire to avoid excessive complications—we defined badness as:
where
- Db is the number of bad domains detected
- Dt is the number of active domains observed
You can think of this number as the bad domains fraction weighted with the registrar's size, or as the order of magnitude of the problem weighted with the effectiveness of anti-abuse policies. Presented this way, this data more closely matches the perceptions Spamhaus staff has in dealing with this issue in a daily production basis. We hope that this definition helps to spotlight registrars that in one way or another can be considered problematic, in a fair way.
These data represent domains seen by Spamhaus systems, and not a registrar's total domain corpus. Domains in this data are in active use, showing up in mail feeds and related DNS traffic within the last 30 days. Other domains may be parked or used for traffic outside of our systems' focus, and those domains are not included in this summary.
The registrars listed on this page provide spammers and other miscreants with a service they need in order to survive. Many, even most, registrars succeed, by and large, in keeping abusers off their systems and work to maintain a positive reputation. That success shows that these ten worst could, if they tried, "keep clean" by turning spammers and other abusers away.
Source: Spamhaus (DBL) database. Data is compiled automatically from the DBL database using the percentage of DBL listed domains for each registrar.
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| The 10 Most Abused Domain Registrars |
| As of 01 December 2023 the registrars with the worst reputations for spam domains are: |
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1
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nicenic.net (ZhuHai NaiSiNiKe Information Technology) |
Badness Index: 2.95
Domains seen: 2,714
Bad domains: 1,139 (42.0%)
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2
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DOMAINSHOP-RU |
Badness Index: 1.99
Domains seen: 1,289
Bad domains: 424 (32.9%)
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3
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Alibaba / HiChina / net.cn (阿里云计算有限公司) |
Badness Index: 0.86
Domains seen: 95,831
Bad domains: 9,061 (9.5%)
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4
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OwnRegistrar / Trunkoz |
Badness Index: 0.74
Domains seen: 6,558
Bad domains: 732 (11.2%)
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5
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NameSilo |
Badness Index: 0.62
Domains seen: 90,115
Bad domains: 6,409 (7.1%)
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6
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ENom |
Badness Index: 0.58
Domains seen: 53,481
Bad domains: 3,786 (7.1%)
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7
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COSMOTOWN, INC. |
Badness Index: 0.50
Domains seen: 4,181
Bad domains: 356 (8.5%)
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8
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PSI (PSI-USA/PSI-JAPAN/Domain Robot) |
Badness Index: 0.46
Domains seen: 24,895
Bad domains: 1,544 (6.2%)
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9
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WebNic.cc (Web Commerce Communications) |
Badness Index: 0.41
Domains seen: 8,619
Bad domains: 553 (6.4%)
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10
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URL Solutions |
Badness Index: 0.40
Domains seen: 5,134
Bad domains: 354 (6.9%)
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