A recent study conducted by Brandsight has revealed that 28% of the top 500 most-highly trafficked sites now employ registry locking. In contrast, only 15% of the top 500 most highly-trafficked sites were leveraging registry locking in 2013.

Back in 2013, only 356 of the top 500 most-highly trafficked sites could be registry locked, but that number has also risen significantly so that now 396 of the top 500 most-highly trafficked sites are eligible.

Registry locking provides an additional layer of security so that domains are protected against hacktivists from pointing domains to politically motivated content, disgruntled employees from embarrassing their employers, and inadvertent mistakes which unfortunately still happen. Registry locked domains are only editable when a unique, manual security protocol is completed between the registry and the registrar.

A number of factors have likely contributed to the increase including the adoption of registry locking by ccTLD operators, as well as strong promotion and marketing by corporate registrars.

Interestingly, across these highly-trafficked sites, only two dozen registrars appear to be supporting registry locking.

While I am glad to see the strong increase in numbers, there are still nearly 200 .com registrations across these highly-trafficked sites which are not locked at the registry. Clearly, the trend is moving in the right direction, but there is still some work to do to protect these valuable domains. And while we haven’t seen any recent registrar hacks, why take the risk with such valuable assets?