Paul Vixie is well known in the Internet community as the implementor of DNS. He makes a very important announcement today on CircleID about a new tool he’s developed to blacklist malicious domains:

Most new domain names are malicious.

I am stunned by the simplicity and truth of that observation. Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. Domains are cheap, domains are plentiful, and as a result most of them are dreck or worse.

Society’s bottom feeders have always found ways to use public infrastructure to their own advantage, and the Internet has done what it always does which is to accelerate such misuse and enable it to scale in ways no one could have imagined just a few years ago. Just as organized crime has always required access to the world’s money supply and banking system, so it is that organized e-crime now requires access to the Internet’s resource allocation systems. They are using our own tools against us, while we’re all competing to see which one of us can make our tools most useful.

Read the post for a description of the tool and the approach.