Time-Series Measurement of Parked Domain Names

Domain parking is a monetization mechanism for displaying online advertisements in unused domain names. Some domain names used in cyber attacks are known to leverage domain parking services after the attack. However, the temporal relationships between domain parking services and malicious domain names have not been studied well. In this study, we investigated how malicious domain names using domain parking services change over time. We conducted a large-scale measurement study of more than 66.8 million domain names that have used domain parking services in the past 19 months. We reveal the existence of 3,964 domain names that have been malicious after using domain parking. We also reveal the existence of 3.02 million domain names that utilized multiple parking services simultaneously or while switching between them. Our study can contribute to the efficient analysis of malicious domain names using domain parking services.