Cracking the Wall of Confinement: Understanding and Analyzing Malicious Domain Take-downs

Take-down operations aim to disrupt cybercrime involving malicious domains. In the past decade, many successful take-down operations have been reported, including those against the Conficker worm, and most recently, against VPNFilter. Although it plays an important role in fighting cybercrime, the domain take-down procedure is still surprisingly opaque. There seems to be no in-depth understanding about how the take-down operation works and whether there is due diligence to ensure its security and reliability.