  This work takes a first look at domain names related to COVID-19 (Cov19doms
in short), using a large-scale registered Internet domain name database, which
accounts for 260M of distinct domain names registered for 1.6K of distinct
top-level domains. We extracted 167K of Cov19doms that have been registered
between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2020. We attempt to
answer the following research questions through our measurement study: RQ1: Is
the number of Cov19doms registrations correlated with the COVID-19 outbreaks?,
RQ2: For what purpose do people register Cov19doms? Our chief findings are as
follows: (1) Similar to the global COVID-19 pandemic observed around April
2020, the number of Cov19doms registrations also experienced the drastic
growth, which, interestingly, pre-ceded the COVID-19 pandemic by about a month,
(2) 70 % of active Cov19doms websites with visible content provided useful
information such as health, tools, or product sales related to COVID-19, and
(3) non-negligible number of registered Cov19doms was used for malicious
purposes. These findings imply that it has become more challenging to
distinguish domain names registered for legitimate purposes from others and
that it is crucial to pay close attention to how Cov19doms will be used/misused
in the future.
