Do the Internet Security Alerts Have an Impact on Lowering ccTLD Security Risks?

Despite all the security measures to build a safely networked world there are innumerable loopholes for malicious activity. One of the countermeasures to fight such malicious activities is to issue security alerts. The purpose of this paper is to see if there is significant impact by these security alerts; to best of our knowledge, this is the first statistical study to understand such impact of Internet security alerts. For the analysis, this paper looks at two of the most malicious security alerts, the Phishing and Spam, issued by two well-known sources. The statistical analysis concludes that for Phishing, the security alerts indeed has a significant positive impact at ccTLD2 level. For Spam, the security alert data issued by reputed organizations is less frequent. As such, the available data is limited; and, our statistical analysis concludes that Spam is still out of control at ccTDL level. However, considering the significant positive impact on Phishing due to security alerts, it seems reasonable to suggest that the agencies issuing security alerts must be more serious and regular in publishing the rankings than at present.