Jul 2, 2011 04:49 GMT  ·  By

Google has deindexed all .co.cc websites from its search engine because of the massive abuse registered by the bulk domain provider and it's failure to respond adequately to it.

Earlier this week, .co.cc domain owners stopped receiving traffic from Google and searching for "insite:co.cc" on the world's largest search engine no longer returns results from the troubled domain space.

Google has not released any official statement about this, but in a June 17 blog post it warned that its systems might ban bulk domain services abused by cyber criminals.

"Google’s automated malware scanning systems detect sites that distribute malware. To help protect users we recently modified those systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain," the company said at that time.

The .co.cc service is provided by a private Korean company, not the official registry for .cc, the country-code TLD for Cocos Islands. It offers two domain names for free and low-cost bulk registrations.

For example, registering 100 domains costs $10, 230 costs $20, and so on. The service supports bulk registrations of up to 15,000 domains at once for $1,000 and the company claims there are currently over 11,300,000 registered .co.cc domain names.

The flexibility and low cost of the service has made it a favorite for cyber criminals who now use .co.cc domains in many of their campaigns, particularly scareware distribution ones.

Google's decision to deindex all .co.cc sites does not necessarily protect users unless they are also banned via the company's Safe Browsing service used by Firefox and Chrome.

That's because, at least as far as scareware distribution goes, the .co.cc landing pages didn't show up in Google search results anyway. Instead, users are redirected to them after they click on links pointing to compromised websites.

Other free or bulk domain services that are commonly abused by cyber criminals, although to a lesser extent, are .tk, the ccTLD for Tokelau, and .co.tv.