Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice

ICANN warned the .top registry (Jiangsu Bangning) to remediate DNS abuse handling or risk losing its license, as Interisle’s analysis shows .top is among the most abused TLDs for phishing (117k of 2.76M domains), with the phishing ecosystem shifting toward IPFS-hosted pages (+1,300%), low-cost TLDs and subdomain services (e.g., blogspot, weebly, github.io, wix, ChangeIP) after Freenom’s demise, and heavy bulk registrations (e.g., 17,562 .lol domains in 8 hours), while ICANN’s public enforcement trends often cite payment arrears.