Google has just blocked more than 11 millions of .co.cc websites from its search engine result pages due to the fact that majority of them leverage that avenue for spam activities.
The domain .co.cc is offered by a Korea company (http://co.cc) that actually owns the domain name .co.cc, so it is not yet officially autorized as a second-level domain like co.au or co.uk.
According to google they see the firm as a "freehost" and has the right to block the whole domain "if we see a very large faction of sites on a specific freehost are spammy or low-quality", according to Matt Cutt, head of Google's web spam team.
In a recent blog post, the company said "To help protect users we recently modified those [malware-scanning] systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain.
Recently the Anti-Phishing Working Group released a 29-page report stating that .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, thats almost double the number found under any other extension.
Reason was due to a large number of attacks originating from .co.cc addresses, the APWG said.
The registry offers single sub-domain for free and allows customers to bulk-register 15,000 addresses at a time for a mere $1000 or about seven cents a name.
The stats on their website claims to have 5,735,855 individual accounts and a total of 11,383,736 registered domains, making it one of the largest domain extensions in the world even bigger than both .org and .uk over two million domains.
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