Scammers will have a harder time trying to do phishing: banks are picking up new type top level domain names (TLD) to prevent attacks.
In the land of email, phishing scams are a common sight: your bank or credit card company supposedly sends you an email, with a request to either click on a link or reply with details.
This is all a big scam of course, trying to either get you to fill in financially critical data and/or trying to break into your computer via the installation of malware on your computer after clicking a link.
Banks are battling this on many fronts, and one of it is the domain name industry. Earlier last year, new types of TLD names have become available so that there is no more limit to the type of TLD you can register.
A quote from the Wall Street Journal article:
The new addresses include extensions like dot-citi, dot-bofa and dot-barclays. The banks hope these extensions will help their online customers know they are actually dealing with the bank and not a scam website trying to pilfer personal information.
The trouble with these new TLDs like .citi, .americanexpress and .jpmorgan is that the end user doesn’t know about these TLDs yet. Things will have to move slow, both in services offered from those new domains as well as communications. If it all goes too fast, consumers might think that scammers are trying to pull a phishing scam on them instead of the actual banks trying to conduct business.
Other reasons for registering these TLDs that are mentioned are customer service and brand promotion. Having a TLD like .jpmorgan or .barclays can provide a clear endpoint for people: when visiting a domain like service.barclays they can be sure they are at their bank’s domain and not at a scammer’s site.
You can read the whole WSJ article here.
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