.cm is the

country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

(ccTLD) for the

Republic of Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

History

In August 2006, it was reported that the .cm registry had set up a

wildcard DNS record A wildcard DNS record is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for non-existent domain names. A wildcard DNS record is specified by using a * as the leftmost label (part) of a domain name, e.g. *.example.com. The exact rules for when a wi ...

, so that all unregistered domains in this top-level domain go to a parking page with paid search links. This was likely intended to take advantage of typographical errors by users attempting to reach .com web sites. Auctions of .cm domains have been as high as $81,000 in 2009 for what pitchmen have termed "prime real estate". However, some bloggers have noted that nothing of any real value was actually put up for auction, despite the price war. Namejet.com, the official auction site for the .CM domain registrar Netcom.cm, sold over $500,000 in .cm domain names the first day and over $2 million in the first week.

Reputation

In a report published in December 2009 by

McAfee McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American proprietary software company focused on online ...

, "Mapping the Mal Web - The world's riskiest domain", .cm was reportedly the riskiest domain in the world, with 36.7% of the sites posing a security risk to PCs. It is widely assumed that malicious domain programmers rely on inadvertent misspellings of well-trafficked websites ending in ".com" to lure unsuspecting users to their domains. The .cm top-level domain is also used for domain name hacks by legitimate organizations, such as the CyanogenMod project, which used get.cm as an easily remembered URL shortener for distributing versions of its software, and ''The Hill'', which uses hill.cm as a URL shortener when linking to its articles on social media.

References

External links

Article about the man who profits from redirecting all the unregistered .cm domains
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cm Country code top-level domains Communications in Cameroon Science and technology in Cameroon he:סיומת אינטרנט#טבלת סיומות המדינות sv:Toppdomän#C