Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Forgot to register an organizational .ai domain? Odds are good someone’s already snatched that domain up.
According to a recent report by compliance services firm CSC, from 2022 to 2023 the number of domain dispute cases over .ai extensions increased by 350% YOY. That indicates a surge in domain squatting by third parties looking to misappropriate other companies’ brands, CSC argued.
Cybersquatters are often little more than rent-seekers hoping to cash in by flipping choice domains for exorbitant prices. While most domains run in the hundreds to thousands of dollars, NameBio data on over 8,000 sales shows a handful of .ai domains have sold for hundreds of thousands (the highest on the list is you.ai at $700,000, while the average price is nearly $1,200).
But URLs that might attract wandering netizens via typos, misdirects, or random chance are also easily utilized for a variety of more malicious purposes like brand impersonation, malware distribution, and phishing. Threat actors often use tactics like SEO poisoning and malvertising to boost the search rankings and traffic of illegitimate sites.
When Google announced new top-level domains matching common file types like .zip and .mov in May 2023, for example, the SANS Institute quickly detected a spike in registrations of websites like “chrome-installer.zip” with no immediately obvious legitimate purpose.
CSC’s analysis found that the “overall third-party registration or infringement” rate for Global 2000 company-associated .ai domains stands at 43%, while nearly one-half of the domains are available to register. All told, of the companies with branded domains registered for .ai, around 84% are owned by third parties.
Despite its popularity with companies in the red-hot artificial intelligence business, .ai was never actually intended for use by them. It’s actually the legacy top-level domain for Anguilla created in 1995, predating the creation of the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1998.
Each registration or renewal of .ai domain comes with a $50 fee that mostly flows to the island’s government—a multimillion-dollar source of income for the territory. In fact, .ai domain revenue is expected to reach one-quarter or more of Anguillan revenue this year.
“.AI is a domain extension with no registration restriction, so it makes it an attractive and accessible domain name for cybercriminals,” CSC Digital Brand Services Division President Mark Calandra told CSO Online.
“Due to the significant media coverage recently on the potential use of AI for fraud in the future, registering your brand in the .ai domain extension is important to protect your key trademarks,” Calandra added.