• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 4, 2015

The Security analyst blog Blue Coat defended why one of Google's new domain names, .zip, made it to the top of its "shady Web neighborhoods" list after Google and others questioned the move.

Google's .zip top-level domain name is one of more than 1,000 new TLDs that surfaced since ICANN freed a multitude of Web addresses, adding to .com and .org.

"What makes the .zip TLD interesting is that it really only has one live domain as of today: nic.zip, which is Google's pre-registration page," wrote Chris Larsen, team research lead at Blue Coat. in a post. "Actually, it's a bit of a stretch to even call it a domain -- it just relays to a page on google.com talking about their new TLDs."

Blue Coat researchers analyzed tens of millions of Web sites requested by 75 million global users to rank the TLDs that pose the greatest potential threat to visitors.

The listed TLDs have more than 95% of their sites with shady ratings in its main database.

These sites have earned a ranking either because of malware, spam, scam, phishing or other suspicious activity. Each of these TLDs has hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of rated Web sites -- less than 5% of which are rated with a normal category, according to the security firm.

What seems a bit awkward is the report suggests many of the shady TLDs are used for scams and spam, and have multiple sites to switch back and forth. Larsen admits that Google's site has one live domain, the pre-registration page. Regardless, the .zip URLs show up in Blue Coat's traffic logs, among the billion or so anonymized Web requests that its customers send daily.