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Domain Abuse Activity Reporting

ICANN's Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) project is a system for studying and reporting on domain name registration and security threats (domain abuse1) across top-level domain (TLD) registries. The overarching purpose of DAAR is to develop a robust, reliable, and reproducible methodology for analyzing security threat activity, which the ICANN community may use to make informed policy decisions.

The system collects TLD zone data and complements these data sets with a large set of high-confidence Reputation Block List (RBL) security threat data feeds. These feeds are provided by 3rd party providers and domains. Each of them is compiled using different methodologies such as crowd sourcing, spam filters, and honeypots, among others. These feeds are gathered from identified phishing, malware, spam and botnet command and control security threats. Note that except for a few feeds where the RBL itself contains tags, neither the DAAR system nor the other feeds make explicit distinctions between maliciously registered domains and those that have been compromised.

The aggregated statistics and anonymized data collected by the DAAR system can serve as a platform for studying, reporting daily, or historically the registration data, or the abuse activity by each registry. This aggregated data is currently pushed to the registries using ICANN's Service Level Agreement Monitoring (SLAM) system. ICANN's Monitoring API (MoSAPI) allows registry operators to retrieve information collected by the SLAM system.

The data collected out of the DAAR system is being used to generate DAAR monthly reports. The reports provide a monthly analysis (a median aggregate over the whole month) of all TLDs for which data was available. They also provide aggregated statistics and time-series analyses about security threats of interest to DAAR, namely, phishing, malware, spam, and botnet command and control.

Please note that DAAR data is neither intended to provide information about security threat mitigation nor to account for how reliably or quickly security threats are mitigated by TLDs. DAAR is intended to inform its users about areas on which security threats are concentrated within the TLD space and how this concentration changes over time.

This webpage provides links to DAAR monthly reports along with a couple of other DAAR-related documents listed below:

  • DAAR monthly reports
  • A DAAR context document that outlines the context behind the monthly reports and summarizes the methodology behind DAAR
  • A DAAR methodology paper that explains in detail how DAAR data is collected and how metrics are defined
  • Two independent reviews of the DAAR methodology paper
  • A set of anonymized and identified documents that contain public comments on DAAR reviews
  • The Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Security, Stability, and Resiliency team's (OCTO-SSR) responses to public input

Domain Abuse Activity Reporting FAQ

Domain Abuse Activity (DAAR) Monthly Reports

Context Document: Understanding the DAAR Monthly Report [PDF, 72 KB]

2021

2020

2019

2018

Other Resources

1 DAAR will use the term "security threat" in place for "abuse" as a part of its updated terminology

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."