McAfee ranks world's dodgiest domains

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 4 Jun 2008 at 14:11

The Hong Kong domain has become the "most dangerous place to surf" according to security firm, McAfee.

The company claims that nearly one in five of the websites ending in .hk pose a security risk. Hong Kong is closely followed by China (.cn) with over 11%, the Philippines (.ph), Romania (.ro) and Russia (.ru).

The fact that a site bears the domain name of a country doesn't necessarily mean it originates from the country involved, of course. Malware writers often hunt out the cheapest domain names or target those with the weakest registration processes.

The .info domain is also something of a security blackspot, with 11.8% of sites resulting in some form of security threat. Plain old .com sites are ninth of the list of risky generic domains.

And for those looking for a safe harbour? Finland (.fi), Japan (.jp), Norway (.no), Slovenia (.si) and Columbia (.co) are the cleanest domains, according to McAfee's analysis of 9.9 million sites with its SiteAdvisor tool.