{"id":175386,"date":"2023-11-04T05:25:35","date_gmt":"2023-11-04T10:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/how-a-tiny-pacific-island-became-the-global-capital-of-cybercrime"},"modified":"2023-11-04T05:25:35","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T10:25:35","slug":"how-a-tiny-pacific-island-became-the-global-capital-of-cybercrime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/how-a-tiny-pacific-island-became-the-global-capital-of-cybercrime","title":{"rendered":"How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-a-tiny-pacific-island-became-the-global-capital-of-cybercrime.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn\u2019t even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. \u201cWe discovered the.tk,\u201d remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau\u2019s sole telecom operator.<\/p>\n<p>Zuurbier said \u201cthat he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use,\u201d remembers Vitale. It was all a bit of a surprise\u2014but striking a deal with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the resources to run its own domain. In the model pioneered by Zuurbier and his company, now named Freenom, users could register a free domain name for a year, in exchange for having advertisements hosted on their websites. If they wanted to get rid of ads, or to keep their website active in the long term, they could pay a fee.<\/p>\n<p>In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant\u2014but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its.tk domain had more users than any other country\u2019s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used.tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn\u2019t even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. \u201cWe discovered the.tk,\u201d remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau\u2019s sole telecom operator. Zuurbier said \u201cthat he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}