Tag Archive for: successful

How successful are the most expensive websites of all time?


The widespread outages around 1000 GMT also hit the UK government website, CNN and the BBC – Copyright POOL/AFP PHILIPPE DESMAZES

A new study reveals website traffic of the costliest domain names in history. This review finds the most expensive domain name ever currently receives 88,000 visitors per month. Remarkably, the third costliest domain name has no registered monthly traffic.

How much is a good website name worth? People and companies have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for specific domain names. Is this always worth the return on investment? Maybe not is the answer.

A new study by web hosting provider Hostinger has investigated the top seven most expensive domain names ever, to see how the sites are doing now. The data, provided to Digital Journal for review, assesses what traffic these sites receive and whether the outlay was worth it.

As to the most expensive websites:

Voice.com

  • Cost: $30 million in 2019
  • Current monthly traffic: 88.8k

The voice.com website describes Voice as “a team of technologists, artists and curators using the transformative power of NFTs to make digital art collectable.” The company bought the domain name in June 2019 from enterprise analytics and software company MicroStrategy.

360.com

  • Cost: $17 million in 2015
  • Current monthly traffic: 23.9 million

360.com belongs to the Chinese Internet security company 360 Security Technology Inc, and currently receives 23.9million monthly visitors, which ranks it as the 154th biggest website in China. The domain name was bought from Vodafone in February 2015 for $17 million

NFTs.com

  • Cost: $15 million in 2022
  • Current monthly traffic: data not available

NFTs.com is one of the most recent sales in the top ten, after it was purchased in August 2022 for $15 million. The site currently contains very little information, but says it is “powered by DigitalArtists.com Marketplace”.

Sex.com

  • Cost: $13million in 2010
  • Current monthly traffic: 64 million

This domain name was sold in November 2010 from Escom to Clover Holdings after it won an auction. The provocative name receives more traffic than the rest of the top five sites combined, with 64 million visitors each month, and it was recently announced that the name…

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Ransomware Revenue Drops Amidst Less Successful Extortion Attempts: Chainalysis


2022 has been a turbulent year. One good thing to come out of it is that – ransomware earnings are significantly down.

Attacks on the crypto industry remain rampant. However, data suggests that victims are increasingly refusing to pay ransomware attackers. Blockchain analytics company Chainalysis, in a new report, shed light on the changing dynamics in the ransomware industry.

Zooming in on Ransomware Attacks 2022

It found that over 10,000 unique strains were active in the first half of the year alone – a trend that was also confirmed by on-chain data. In comparison, around 5,400 unique strains were recorded to be active over the same period of 2021. The number of active strains has increased substantially in recent years, a major portion, however, goes to a small group of strains at any given time.

Lifespans of ransomware have slid in 2022. In fact, the average ransomware strain was found to be active for just 70 days, down from 153 in 2021 and 265 in 2020. Most attackers funnel the extorted funds to mainstream centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. This number surged from 39.3% in 2021 to 48.3% in 2022.

On the other hand, ill-gotten funds being moved to high-risk exchanges fell from 10.9% to 6.7%. A similar declining trend was seen in the usage of illicit services such as darknet markets for ransomware money laundering. However, the usage of coin mixers for the same purpose has increased from 11.6% to 15.0%.

Less Frequent Ransom Payments

Chainalysis stated that the estimate for 2022’s total ransomware revenue fell by 40.3% to at least $456.8 million in 2022 from $765.6 million in 2021. The drop is substantial and demonstrated increasing unwillingness among the victims to pay ransomware attackers and not a decline in the actual number of exploits.

While asserting that ransomware continues to be a major cyber threat to businesses and enterprises, Michael Phillips, Chief Claims Officer of cyber insurance firm Resilience, noted:

“There have, however, been signs that meaningful disruptions against ransomware actor groups are driving lower than expected successful extortion attempts.”

Especially over the past four years, the probability of victims paying a…

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Cybersecurity is a must for a successful digital transition – EURACTIV.com


SMEs – key cog in the wheel of the EU economy.

The World Economic Forum has stated in its annual report that was published earlier this year that cybersecurity is one of the top ten risks for businesses globally. And evidently, this is very important from the viewpoint of small and medium sized companies. This is because we should re-call that SMEs contribute to half of European GDP at present. At a time of serious economic challenges, we must do more to protect, promote and grow opportunities for small and medium sized enterprises. The EU needs our SMEs to prosper as we seek to collectively re-build the economy of Europe in a safe and secure manner.

Practical advice to SMEs to reduce cyber risk.

I welcome the EIT Digital, the Global Digital Foundation and the Huawei Questions and Answers cybersecurity guide for SMEs that was published this week in Brussels. This joint publication will help to protect further the supply chains in Europe.

Many cyber-attacks are focused on SMEs operating within the EU supply chain. In fact, ENISA (The EU Agency for Cybersecurity) has found that cyber-attacks against the EU supply chain have accounted for 17% of all cyber-attacks – compared to 1% only last year.

This guide is very useful and practical in that it helps SMEs to identify different and complex cyber-attacks. SMEs need to make their staff aware of the nature of malware, phishing, web based and DDoS cyber-attacks. Companies need to communicate carefully with staff and explain how to act so as to reduce cyber risk. One should re-call that 60% of cyber-attacks relate to human error. And this is why it is so important that people should use strong passwords and manage vulnerabilities within the products and services that they provide. There are some very good materials available in this guide that can help and advise SMEs reduce the risk of cyber-attacks. For example, every member state has a CSIRT office. Each Computer Security Incident Response Team located within the 27 EU member state can help SMEs with advice to counter cyber-attacks. ENISA also have a lot of strong materials on the subject too.

EU action in the area of improving cybersecurity is growing.

The…

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Survey reveals the important role of ‘malicious insiders’ in successful ransomware attacks


Gigamon has published the State of Ransomware 2022 and Beyond report, aimed at providing valuable insights on how the ransomware threatscape is evolving. According to the global survey of IT and security leaders across the US, EMEA, and APAC, nearly one-third of organizations have suffered a ransomware attack enabled by a malicious insider – a threat seen as commonly as the accidental insider (35 percent). Furthermore, 59 percent of organizations believe ransomware has worsened in the last three months, with phishing (58 percent), malware/computer viruses (56 percent) and cloud applications (42 percent) cited as other common threat vectors.

As the ransomware crisis worsens, threat actors like Lapsus$ group are now well-known for preying on disgruntled employees to gain access to corporate networks – 95 percent (and 99 percent of CISOs/CIOs) view the malicious insider as a significant risk. 66 percent of these respondents now have a strategy for addressing both types of insider threats. However, the report says that it’s clear that many organizations lack the visibility required to distinguish which type of insider threat is endangering their business, which makes it significantly harder to mitigate risk.

Additional key findings include:

Ransomware is seen as a board-level priority
89 percent of global boardrooms see ransomware as a priority concern, a number that rises in the UK (93 percent), Australia (94 percent) and Singapore (94 percent). When asked how this cyber threat is viewed, the leading perception across all regions was that it is a ‘reputational issue’ (33 percent).

Cyber insurance is causing concern
57 percent of those surveyed agreed that the cyber insurance market is exacerbating the ransomware crisis. In APAC, where cyber insurance is most commonly employed, this concern is felt by 66 percent of Australian respondents and 68 percent of those in Singapore.

The US is leading the way with zero trust
While EMEA may have lost some confidence in implementing zero trust, 59 percent in the US agree that this framework is attainable.

More details.

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