.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 ...
(ccTLD) for
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west- central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the ...
.
The official registrar for .cm domains is ''Netcom.cm'', based in
Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. ''Netcom.cm Sarl'' was founded in early 2008 as a partner of ANTIC (), the information technology regulator for Cameroon. On October 15, 2008, NETCOM.cm Sarl launched the registry service for .com.cm, .co.cm and .net.cm. The current version of .cm domains went live August 27, 2009.
History
In August 2006, it was reported that the .cm registry had set up a
wildcard DNS record, 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
The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...
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 global computer security software company head ...
, "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
.cm whois information - Official Registrar Netcom.CM.cm official domain registrar for .cm Cameroon
* ttps://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/cm.html IANA .cm whois informationbr>cnet.com: McAfee uncovers riskiest domains
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cm
Country code top-level domains
Communications in Cameroon
Science and technology in Cameroon
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