Parked Domains Still Problematic
J
Jared Roy
Hello,
First - I want to recognize the hard work at DNS Filter to continuously improve on this feature. At one time, they had monthly checks; now it's weekly and daily checks on parked lists.
That said, we still have a problem:
First-time visitors at the organizational level.
While we are relatively new to the platform, in the last 6 months, almost all of the requests that were reporting sites that were false positives were due to the Park Domains category. While we have no specific vertical, chance would have it that we work with several non-profits that issue grants to startups, so they are hit with this issue the hardest. That said, our full coverage body experiences the issue.
My solution comes in two steps:
- Automate the scans that are being done daily/weekly to be done on the fly as a visitor accesses the page.
- Change the block page for the Parked site and domains to say something like "This site is being rescanned, please try again in a few minutes."
DNSFilter has FirstSight and AI tools that are already used for handling rescanning of sites - I wonder if they could apply FirstSight to parked domains, and recategorize on the fly, without significant changes to server load. If it were applied, solution two would be necessary to keep users from submitting a request to recategorize.
Minetta Gould
said it once already, but thanks for the thoughtful post! Our Security Intelligence team really appreciates the insight. You’re spot on that the pain comes from
first-time visitors
, and the team is already exploring longer-term solutions in that direction. It's a multi-team effort, and plenty of other work to be done, but improvements and additions to the Labs space is always on their mind. In the meantime, one thing you might consider: if most of your false positives stem from the Parked Sites category, it may be worth testing a policy without it. Since it’s a Labs space, which is meant as Beta policy settings, it isn’t always precise enough for environments where users regularly visit newly launched or early-stage domains. Some customers keep it enabled, others prefer to drop it—it really depends on the trade-off.
Your feedback is incredibly helpful, and we’ll keep you posted as the category evolves!