In the March 2024 survey we received responses from 1,090,117,902 sites across 271,804,260 domains and 12,627,575 web-facing computers. This reflects an increase of 3.2 million sites, 662,534 domains, and 138,322 web-facing computers. OpenResty experienced the largest gain of 3.0 million…
Category: Netcraft
Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown
A staggering 12.6 million domains on TLDs controlled by Freenom (.tk, .cf and .gq) have been shut down and no longer resolve, leading to a significant reduction in the number of websites hosted by Cloudflare. The disappearance of these websites…
Online investment scams: Inside a fake trading platform
Online investment scams are a global, growing, and uniquely pernicious threat. In newly released data, the Federal Trade Commission attributed more than $4.6 billion of US fraud losses in 2023 to investment scams, more than any other fraud category, and…
What Apple is afraid of — pre-DMA alternative iOS app stores are already riddled with malware
Ahead of the EU’s Digital Market Act forcing Apple’s hand to permit alternative app download options, is the amount of malware in the existing grey-market for sideloading iPhone apps a portent for things to come? Or has Apple’s approach, despite…
February 2024 Web Server Survey
In the February 2024 survey we received responses from 1,086,916,398 sites across 271,141,726 domains and 12,489,253 web-facing computers. This reflects an increase of 7.8 million sites, 694,270 domains, and 151,543 web-facing computers. OpenResty made the largest gain of 4.7 million…
Phishception – SendGrid is abused to host phishing attacks impersonating itself
Netcraft has recently observed that criminals abused SendGrid’s services to launch a phishing campaign impersonating SendGrid itself. The well-known provider, now owned by Twillio, makes sending emails at scale simple and flexible. In addition to scale, the promise of high…
PHP-less phishing kits that can run on any website
Criminals can now deploy phishing sites on any type of web server, even when commonly used server-side technologies such as PHP are not supported. Phishing kits are predominantly implemented in PHP, as this provides the server-side functionality required to store…
January 2024 Web Server Survey
In the January 2024 survey we received responses from 1,079,154,539 sites across 270,447,456 domains and 12,337,710 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.9 million sites, a gain of 1.2 million domains, and a loss of 17,900 web-facing computers. nginx…
New Year, New Scams – Health product scam campaigns abusing cheap TLDs
In recent months, we’ve noticed an increased number of high-volume health product campaigns that exploit cheap top-level domains (TLDs), reaching up to 60% of a TLD’s daily domain registrations. This blog looks at current trends around health product scams and…
“Quishing” you a Happy Holiday Season
QR Code phishing scams — What they are and how to avoid them. Originally invented to keep track of car parts in the early 90s, QR codes have been around for decades. After gaining broader acceptance during the COVID-19 pandemic,…