The well established banking institution, Barclays recently revealed that it is turning it\u2019s back on the dot com. TLD and instead will be transferring it\u2019s online presence to .barclays and .barclaycard. The move is motivated by an effort to prevent \u2018phishers\u2019 scamming it\u2019s online customers. Over the coming weeks, the Barclays group will cease to use the .com and .co.uk TLD\u2019s. Chief Information Security Officer, Troels Oerting, stated that the reasoning behind this change \u2018ultimately serves to increase trust and confidence in Barclays\u2019 online entities\u2019 and to provide a \u2018more secure service\u2019 for it\u2019s customers.<\/p>\n
The term Phishing has pervaded newspaper headlines over the past week as a recent report released by the APWG ( Anti-Phishing Working Group) revealed that fraudulent phishing activity reached an unprecedented high in 2014, with a large majority originating from China. The report showed that domain names are more and more being used as a mechanism to \u2018phish\u2019 for web users private data and confidential financial information. Popular TLD\u2019s are often the target of phishing attacks as naturally top TLD\u2019s attract the greatest number of web users.<\/p>\n
The APWG report also highlighted that phishing attacks have been steadily on the increase across a variety of different industries. Further findings in the report were quite shocking. Phishing attacks increased from 8hours 42 mins in 2014 up to 10 hours and 6 mins, So what explains this exponential rise in this fraudulent activity? Many speculate that ICANN\u2019s new gTLD program may explain the huge rise in phishing attacks globally.<\/p>\n