Years ago .info had the reputation of being only used by scammers/phishers. I knew several small mail service providers that just blocked *.info by default since the majority of delegations were not legitimate. Every new TLD suffers from this at first as there is a land rush by criminals.
I think people are more worried about TLDs like .zip (and .app) since they look familiar to normal users and they routinely click on those and don't think about them being a valid URL now.
Because of that, as unfair as it is, to this day when I see one of the extended TLDs, I get more suspicious about the site. I tend to avoid them unless I'm very sure they're legit.
It's weird how entire TLDs get reputations like that.
NY's transit agency - the MTA - used (and still uses) the domain mta.info. My high school blocked that domain, along with every other info domain.
I have a .xyz domain that I briefly wanted to use for email, but services blocked it based entirely off the TLD. Using the same mail service (fastmail) I could send mail from my .net domains.
I think this narrative is just being sold before .zip is a new domain, I find it interesting how fast things are leveraged for hacking though, I'm wondering why this isn't as commonly noted in the AI space (where I work)
Yes, because we're not in the 80s anymore. There are virtually no COM files around anymore. Compare that to zip files, which are still widely used in all kinds of jobs.
> It seems that Google has reduced the registration price to $15 per year for a .zip domain last week, which appears to be less than halve the previous price. The price drop appears to have increased interest for .zip domains, and some new registrations are already used in phishing campaigns.
It is interesting that $15 a year is enough savings to justifying starting a new phishing attempt. I assumed there was so much money in phishing that an extra ~$1.05 a month could be easily absorbed.
Either way, I'm shocked that a .zip domain was ever approved. This should have been obvious for whatever mysterious board approves TLDs.
