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Russia finishes top of Dark Web Olympics medals table
February 2018 by RepKnight
While the sporting world has had its eyes fixed on PyeongChang for the Winter Olympics, dark web cybersecurity firm RepKnight has been doing some digging to publish an alternative medal table – detailing the country-specific top level domains* (TLDs) that feature most heavily on the dark web. The difference with the RepKnight medal table is that no one wants to come first!
Norway topped the medals table in South Korea, it’s also good news for them in terms of the dark web, with the fourth-largest Scandinavian country (.no) finishing second to bottom on RepKnight’s medal table.
On the other hand – while the actual Olympics may have been a bit disappointing for Russia, after they were only just about allowed to participate in PyeongChang in the first place, it’s more bad news for them on the dark web. The .ru TLD finished top of the alternative table with eight gold medals, three silver and two bronze.
Germany (.de) and France both had strong showings in the Winter Olympics, but unfortunately they also finished high on our dark web medal table – finishing second and third respectively. Team GB (.co.uk) finished tenth on our alternative table — just behind the Czech Republic (.cz) and Italy (.it), and ahead of the US (.us) and Sweden (.se).
In total RepKnight counted 7.5 million email addresses posted on the dark web in one month. ‘Global’ TLDs such as .com and .net account for nearly two thirds of those credentials identified, but that still means RepKnight found over 2.7 million email credentials on the dark web associated with ‘national’ TLDs.
Patrick Martin, cybersecurity analyst at RepKnight, said: “The dark web is a substantial, and still growing, threat to businesses all over the world. While we’re not going to be handing out any awards to the ‘winners’ of our alternative medal table, it certainly offers a clearer picture of which countries are being targeted by cyber criminals. Organisations need to wake up to the threat of the dark web and do more to step up the security of their data as well as their network.”
