Explosion in New TLDs
There has been an explosion of new top-level domains in the past year.
In 2013-2014, over 600 new TLDs were approved, and the pace has continued in 2015. In early 2015, the count of valid TLDs was 795 (including the country codes), and by mid-August, the count was over 1000. As the sheer number of new neighborhoods on the web has skyrocketed, so have the opportunities for attackers.
For the sake of comparison, back in its early days, the web was limited to six normal TLDs and roughly 100 "country code" TLDs. This continued for over a decade, with a few additional TLDs being added in 1998, 2001, 2005 – some of which are likely familiar to many users (.info, .biz, .mobi, .name, .pro), and some less familiar (.aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .int, .jobs, .museum, .tel, .travel, .post). The infamous ".xxx" was added in 2011.