As discussed in the Symantec State of Spam Report for February, URLs with the “.cn” country code top level domain (ccTLD) have become a popular ingredient in spam messages. A top-level domain (TLD) is the part of a domain name that follows the final dot of any domain name. A ccTLD is a top-level domain generally reserved or used by a country or a dependent territory. According to the February report, URLs with .cn ccTLDs accounted for approximately 32% of all URLs seen during that period. However, we saw a noticeable decrease in this particular technique starting around the end of January with levels dropping down to 7%. On February 12, we once again observed a revival approaching similar levels as was seen in January—these levels are currently sitting around 29%. The URLs are applied to various kinds of spam attacks, but one of the more popular versions uses legitimate messages such as newsletters and replaces the existing URLs with .cn URLs to peddle spam products. Here are the hourly percentages for .cn ccTLD URLs for the past seven days, which also shows the increase beginning February 12: