The number of .CZ domains registered in connection with the coronavirus is growing

The CZ.NIC report shows statistics that compare the daily registrations of such domains with the overall daily registrations or gradual growth of such registrations over the past three months. There is also data on content analysis of websites and the top twenty domains associated with the coronavirus topic.

Today the CZ.NIC Association, the administrator of the Czech national domain, published an analysis of newly registered domains related to the coronavirus pandemic. In the first quarter of this year, 1,209 domains containing one of the keywords related to COVID-19 were registered. The report shows statistics that compare the daily registrations of such domains with the overall daily registrations or gradual growth of such registrations over the past three months. There is also data on content analysis of websites and the top twenty domains associated with the coronavirus topic. More information is available on the report’s website, which was created as part of the ADAM project consisting in detailed monitoring of actual DNS traffic and its ongoing and subsequent analysis.

By the end of March, the number of domain registrations had increased by 0.09 % in relation to coronavirus. 1,209 newly registered domains were detected using selected keywords (corona, korona, virus, rousk, respirator, epidem, dezinfekc, karanten, covid, pandem, ffp2 and ffp3). The first such domain appeared in the Czech registry already on January 23, before the outbreak in Czechia. A steeper increase in registrations can be seen after the adoption of individual government measures, which have been introduced from March 10, when the schools were closed. On some days, this domain type accounted for 15 to 20 % of the total new daily registrations.

Using a simple automatic classification of web page content associated with COVID-19-related domains, it was discovered that the highest number of domains (519) contains only a placeholder page. Some of them certainly belong to so-called speculative domain names set up for later sale. The second most numerous group (468) are actually existing websites that were created to provide up-to-date statistics and information regarding COVID-19 in Czechia. On these websites, their operators also focus, for example, on coordinating public initiatives such as sewing face masks or organizing other support and charitable activities. It should also be mentioned here that apart from commendable purposes, cases of fraudulent websites have also been detected.

In this context, we encourage users to adhere to the basic principles of safe behavior on the Internet, to pay attention to the credibility of websites dealing with the topic of COVID-19 and to be vigilant especially in the case of fake e-shops, phishing pages and suspicious e-mails.