AI Check on Parked Sites & Domains
under review ( scoping )
Sean Kearney
Yes, this is the biggest complaint we have. Too many domains being parked. There needs to be some sort of detection mechanism in place that starts when a request to access is sent. Just doing bulk checks and updating the database every now and then isn't working well enough.
Greg Gelman
This! Im curious what it is exactly that can be used to classify a site as parked as some people might slap a company logo on it and nothing else and call it a parked site, while custom built, still a parked site. How will dnsfilter determine that site is parked or will it say its not parked because theres a company logo on the page? Curious if theres been any update to determining the frequency of rescanning parked sites
Steve Staden
Greg Gelman : Good question and we're looking at more than just the logo when we're identifying parked domains. Given your example, we would typically identify that as still a parked domain. Frequency is roughly monthly when changes are detected right now. That all said, happy to discuss with you more too, my email is [email protected] and happy to reach out.
Eric Nix
Steve Staden A parked domain with only an image or a link or two is fine by most. A parked domain that is littered with ads/links is different. There should be an AI option that will determine if a parked domain has a bunch of ads/links, then it's blocked.
Sean Kearney
Eric Nix Completely agree. We see a lot of SMB vendors for our clients having a basic one-page site with a logo and some text containing contact details.
Steve Staden
under review ( scoping )
I'm moving this pack to under review at the moment. We've completed the re-scanning of Parked Sites and Domains. We will be adding the capability to rescan on an specific interview.
HRCT
This is a nice idea however websites can display different results at different times so a normal looking website could suddenly go rogue. Also, many malware sites are intentionally designed to geolocate their attack so (for example) they don't display malware to Russian computers but do to Ukranian computers.
Steve Staden
in progress ( live <90 days )
All, we wanted to share an update on improving categorization of Parked Sites and Domains. There were 78+ million Parked domains and sites in our database. We have rescanned 2015 through 2022-01 (44 million domains) with 8% of those changing. We will continue re-scanning, but believe you should start seeing improvement in terms of accuracy. I'll update this further when we have completed all re-scanning.
Moshe D
Steve Staden: This would need to be done periodically. It wouldn't be enough to rescan one time as parked sites change to active sites frequently.
Steve Staden
Moshe D: Agreed. We're looking to then do this on a regular interval. We're working to understand what that interval should be. Thanks for bringing that up.
Steve Staden
up next2
We're looking at improving Parked Sites and Domains so that these domains to get re-scanned and re-categorized.
Steve Staden
Merged in a post:
Ability to trigger automatic recategorization scan
Isaac Good
A lot of the miscategorized domains I see are 'parked' but obviously not. I assume rescanning them would auto categorize them properly but support says there's no way to do that , they have to manually kick it off. It would be nice if the domain lookup tool would have a button to trigger rescanning. This would also reduce your support load.
"When a new domain gets published, the website contents gets ingested by Webshrinker and it makes an assessment on what the category needs to be. If there isn't sufficient content, it gets labeled with the Parked Domain category until it gets rescanned automatically later on. If it is still lacking enough assessable content it will remain labeled as a Parked Domain until reassessed manually. "
Deon
Hell yes. Our biggest issue is how long it takes parked domains to become "unparked" automatically. In fact, it really feels like "never" is the actual answer.