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What does a Domain Name Say

Smits, J.J. (2019) What does a Domain Name Say.

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Abstract:Over the past decades, the amount of internet traffic has grown exponentially. In the beginning, only large organizations and businesses would have a website, nowadays the threshold to register a domain name and start a website is lower than ever before. With the fast increase in the online presence of companies, and the ease of use the internet offers, the number of phishing attacks are at a peak with an average 88,792 active phishing websites in the 3rd quarter of 2019. This is the highest amount of attacks since early 2016. This research aims to identify the categories in which SLD names can be divided. In order to analyze this, three datasets with a different level of reliability are used. The focus of this research is on English SLD names, therefore Unicode domain names are filtered out and not studied in the analysis. Digit-only domain names are taken into account, although they are considered not to contain linguistic value, and therefore are not given a language score. We find that is a correlation between the length of a domain name and the likelihood of that domain name to have a malicious intent. In addition, SLDs consisting of only digits are much more likely to have malicious intent than domains which consist exclusively of letters or a combination of letters and digits. Further, we find that malicious domain names mostly have an English SLD, similar to the representation of the English language in the SLDs of domain in the Alexa top domain list.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:54 computer science
Programme:Business & IT BSc (56066)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/80592
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