AI Check on Parked Sites & Domains | Voters

AI Check on Parked Sites & Domains

launched

Michael

We like to use the Parked Sites & Domains options - however it blocks too many valid sites. Suggestion to have the AI run a categorization check on these sites to try and properly Categorize them. Much in the same way it runs on a Uncategorized Sites.

April 28, 2022

Ryan Poppa

marked this post as

launched

Launched.

Sean Kearney

Ryan Poppa... is there any more detail on how this has been launched?

Ryan Poppa

Sean Kearney: On a frequent basis, we'll review the list of domains that there was traffic to over the previous 7 days that were given the category of "Parked Sites and Domains". Those will be rescanned and assign a new content category if we find non-parked content.

Jared Roy

Ryan Poppa Just some honest feedback. This does not feel like it is helping. While I am sure in the grand scale you see massive numbers of success, things have not really changed for us parked- and we are getting as many Parked requests as we have always been.
I think something more on the fly may be needed. 
Maybe as the user accesses a parked site, it is instantly rescanned, and add something to the block screen that asks to retry in 10 minutes to give time for the scan. 
If the process is automated now, my mind cannot uinderstand why it would not just be on the fly - I could just be ignorant to how it all actualy functions. 
We have had this issue with every Web Filter and DNS Filtering provider we have used - so I am thinking this would make you really stand out in the market. ,

Minetta Gould

Jared Roy: Thanks for the honest feedback—it’s really helpful to hear how this behaves in real environments, not just in aggregate. 🙏
You’re absolutely right that what we do today doesn’t feel “instant” from the perspective of the first person who hits a domain that moved out of parked status. Here’s how things work behind the scenes:
We run a daily automated rescan of domains that recently appeared in customer traffic and are currently tagged as Parked or Uncategorized.
When that rescan runs, the domain will get reclassified correctly—but only for the next person, not the one who triggered the lookup.
There isn’t currently a mechanism to trigger a real-time, on-the-fly recategorization at the moment a user hits a parked domain.
So yes—the daily process improves accuracy over time, but it doesn’t help the user who lands on the domain right now, which is exactly what you’re describing.
An instant rescan workflow (or a “retry in 10 minutes” option on the block page) is not something DNSFilter supports today, and it would be a meaningful new feature with product implications. If real-time rescanning is what you’re looking for, we’d love for you to submit that as a separate request—it helps our Product team size and prioritize ideas like this, and other customers can show support by upvoting your post.
And truly, thank you for the constructive suggestion. We know “Parked” is a tricky category across the entire web-filtering industry, and insights like yours help us explore smarter ways to handle these edge cases. 💡

Jared Roy

Minetta Gould HI Minetta, 
Always happy to see your name pop up in the notifications.. 
Thank you for you the expanded description and clarity. I do like the effort DNSFilter is putting into this,.
I did take your reccommendation make a separate request, found here:
https://feedback.dnsfilter.com/feature-requests/p/parked-domains-still-problematic

Minetta Gould

Jared Roy: Love a good compliment on a Friday! 😊 Happy to help however I can. You definitely got the wheels turning on our Security Intelligence team—thanks for calling out a smart idea. I’ll pass your new post along (really appreciate how thorough it was!), though it sounds like the team is already thinking along the same lines.

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

marked this post as

later

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 Owner

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

marked this post as

now

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

marked this post as

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. "

June 9, 2023

Deon Marshall

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.