Phishing Activity in Hosting Networks (ASNs)
May 1, 2020 - July 31, 2020

To see where phishing sites were being hosted, we collected the IP addresses that phishing domains and phishing URLs were resolving to when phishing activity was detected and added to a threat or block list. We then identified the ASN where the IP prefix containing the IP address of the phish is allocated and this number identifies the hosting network where phishing attacks were reported.

For the August-October 2020 period, we identified

- 119 hosting networks with at least 100 reported phishing attacks,

- 30 hosting networks with at least 500 reported phishing attacks, and

- 18 hosting networks with at least 1000 reported phishing attacks.

We measure phishing attacks to show where phishing sites are hosted and to identify the hosting service that has been allocated the IPv4 address space wherein the IP address of the phishing site lies.

A phisher may use one, several, or large numbers of URLs in a single phishing campaign. We apply rules to our phishing reports to de-duplicate URLs and to analyze hostname, URL path composition, target, and abuse report dates for similarities to obtain sets of URLs that we consider to be involved in one phishing attack. We also apply additional rules to group URLs into attacks based on observed cases.

In the table below, we show the twenty hosting networks with the highest numbers of reported phishing attacks. Several ASNs with small IPv4 address delegations - NAMECHEAP-NET, AWEX,WEEBLY, PUBLIC-DOMAIN-REGISTRY, IHOR-AS, and SHINJIRU-MY-AS-AP - had extraordinarily high counts of phishing attacks during this reporting period.

Ranking of Hosting Networks (ASNs) by Phishing Attacks
(May to July 2020)

Rank AS Name AS number # Routed
IPv4 Addresses
Phishing Attacks ▼ Phishing Attack Score
1 UNIFIEDLAYER-AS-1 46606 1,373,952 9,174 66.77
2 CLOUDFLARENET 13335 1,570,304 8,700 55.40
3 NAMECHEAP-NET 22612 35,072 4,897 1396.27
4 AS-26496-GO-DADDY-COM-LLC 26496 935,168 3,860 41.28
5 AWEX - Hostinger International Limited 204915 768 3,657 47617.19
6 GOOGLE 15169 10,280,960 3,561 3.46
7 CONTABO - Contabo GmbH 51167 217,344 2,988 137.48
8 OVH - OVH SAS 16276 3,485,440 2,602 7.47
9 WEEBLY 27647 2,304 2,573 11167.53
10 DIGITALOCEAN-ASN 14061 2,328,832 2,114 9.08
11 MICROSOFT-CORP-MSN-AS-BLOCK 8075 37,570,816 2,095 0.56
12 AMAZON-02 16509 50,380,544 1,862 0.37
13 PUBLIC-DOMAIN-REGISTRY 394695 32,000 1,512 472.50
14 LIQUIDWEB 32244 250,368 1,188 47.45
15 BCPL-SG BGPNET Global ASN 64050 216,320 1,144 52.88
16 IHOR-AS - Ihor Hosting LLC 35196 29,696 1,134 381.87
17 HETZNER-AS - Hetzner Online GmbH 24940 1,912,576 1,095 5.73
18 CNNIC-ALIBABA-US-NET-AP Alibaba (US) Technology Co. 45102 10,199,296 1,059 1.04
19 SHINJIRU-MY-AS-AP Shinjiru Technology Sdn Bhd 45839 21,248 981 461.69
20 AS-COLOCROSSING 36352 783,360 850 10.85

To allow comparison of large and small Hosting Networks (ASNs), we also rank Hosting Networks based on a metric, phishing attack score, which is calculated by dividing the number phishing attacks reported against an ASN by the number of routable IPv4 addresses allocated to that ASN.

Hosting (ASN) Phishing Attack Score = (number of phishing attacks/IP Addresses in ASN) * 10,000

The table below shows the top 20 hosting operators based on phishing attack score.

Ranking of Hosting Networks (ASNs) by Phishing Attack Score
(May to July 2020)

Hosting Networks (ASNs) with a minimum of 50,000 IPv4 addresses and 25 phishing domains

Rank AS Name AS number # Routed IPv4
Addresses
Phishing attacks Phishing Attack Score ▼
1 CONTABO - Contabo GmbH 51167 217,344 2,988 137.48
2 NOCIX 33387 54,784 734 133.98
3 OPENDNS 36692 58,624 689 117.53
4 AS-HOSTINGER - Hostinger International Limited 47583 70,912 627 88.42
5 AS-REGRU - "Domain names registrar REG.RU", Ltd 197695 71,680 633 88.31
6 UNIFIEDLAYER-AS-1 46606 1,373,952 9,174 66.77
7 CLOUDFLARENET 13335 1,570,304 8,700 55.40
8 BCPL-SG BGPNET Global ASN 64050 216,320 1,144 52.88
9 A2HOSTING 55293 85,760 439 51.19
10 GCORE - G-Core Labs S.A. 199524 72,704 347 47.73
11 LIQUIDWEB 32244 250,368 1,188 47.45
12 AS-26496-GO-DADDY-COM-LLC 26496 935,168 3,860 41.28
13 WII 32097 90,112 292 32.40
14 SSASN2 20454 142,336 418 29.37
15 SUNHK-DATA-AS-AP Sun Network (Hong Kong) Limited - HongKong Backbone 38197 72,192 194 26.87
16 RACKRAY - UAB Rakrejus 62282 53,760 144 26.79
17 PONYNET 53667 55,296 144 26.04
18 IS-AS-1 19318 112,640 257 22.82
19 NFORCE - NForce Entertainment B.V. 43350 71,936 163 22.66
20 MASTER-AS - Master Internet s.r.o. 24971 59,648 134 22.47