"Akamai Reports Massive Spike in Malicious Domain Activity"

Akamai has announced today that it identified nearly 79 million malicious domains in the first half of 2022, accounting for slightly over 20 percent of all Newly Observed Domains (NODs) accessed via its Content Delivery Network (CDN) and other services. According to Akamai, this equates to approximately 13 million malicious domains per month. Researchers at Akamai also noted that two weeks before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a surge in activity resulted in the identification of nearly 40,000 malicious NODs per day, before peaking at more than 250,000 unique malicious .ru domain names per day in the second half of March. Akamai researchers observed about 12 million new NODs on a typical day, with slightly more than two million successfully resolving a Domain Name System (DNS) query. Akamai CacheServe instances are currently processing more than 80 million DNS queries per second, or roughly seven trillion requests per day, from all over the world. Malicious actors tend to register thousands of domain names in bulk because if one or more of their domains is flagged and blocked, they can switch to another of their domains quickly. Most of those domain names are generated programmatically by a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA). As a result, many of the names in the NOD dataset appear to be names that you would never type into a browser window. For example, digits are often inserted into domain names to reduce the likelihood that an automatically generated domain has already been registered. It remains unclear how all of these malicious NODs will be used, but it is clear that the scale at which they are being created is part of a larger cyber warfare strategy. Although the number of malicious NODs created will be a significant concern for governments worldwide, businesses usually suffer the most collateral damage. Organizations can no longer rely solely on endpoint protection software and a firewall to protect against malware, as cybercriminals are collaborating with nation-state hackers to create more malware than ever before. This article continues to discuss the surge in malicious domain activity. 

Security Boulevard reports "Akamai Reports Massive Spike in Malicious Domain Activity"