McAfee: .hk, .cn and .info most dangerous domain extensions

Antivirus software vendor McAfee published a report today found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are “.hk” (Hong Kong), “.cn” (China) and “.info

Of all “.hk” sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of “.cn” sites and 11.7 percent of “.info”.

A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the “.com” domain were identified as dangerous. Dangerous is defined as having domains and sites used for spam, malicious code and other cybercrimes.

According to McAfee other risky domains include “.ro” (Romania), with 6.8 percent, and “.ru” (Russia), with 6 percent of sites flagged as dangerous.

The McAfee report is based on results from 9.9 million Web sites that were tested in 265 domains for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.

McAfee found these to be the least-risky domain names extensions:

“.gov” (government use), with 0.05 percent flagged;

.”fi” Finland with 0.1 percent flaggged

“.jp” (Japan), with 0.1 percent flagged

“.au” (Australia), with 0.3 percent flagged.

The World’s Most         Overall Overall  The World’s       Overall   Overall
Dangerous Country   rank in  rank in  Safest Country    rank in   rank in
Web Domains          2008     2007      Web Domain       2008      2007
(ranked in order)                    (ranked in order)

Hong Kong (.hk)        1       28     Finland (.fi)       74        70
PR of China (.cn)      2       11     Japan (.jp)         72        57
Philippines (.ph)      4       19     Norway (.no)        71        68
Romania (.ro)          5        4     Slovenia (.si)      70        62
Russia (.ru)           8        7     Colombia (.co)      69        64

Other key findings from the McAfee report 2008 include:

The chance of downloading spyware, adware, viruses or other unwanted software from surfing the Web increased 41.5% over 2007

Sites which offer downloads such as ringtones and screen savers that are also loaded with viruses, spyware and adware increased over the last year from 3.3% to 4.7%

The Philippines (.ph) experienced a 270% increase in overall riskiness

Tokelau (.tk) and Samoa (.ws) were notably safer in 2008 dropping to 28th and 12th

In Europe, Spain (.es) experienced a 91% increase in overall risk.