McAfee Identifies Most Web Dangerous Domains to Surf and Search

The second annual McAfee Mapping the Mal Web report (pdf) on the riskiest and safest places on the Web reveals that 19.2% of all Web sites ending in the ".hk" domain pose a security threat to Web users. China (.cn) is second this year with over 11%. By contrast, Finland (.fi) remains the safest online destination for the second year with 0.05%, followed by Japan (.jp). In addition to country domains, McAfee found the .info domain to be the most dangerous generic domain. According to the Report, as much as 11.8 percent of all .info domains pose legitimate security threats. The fewest number of sites likely to pose a security are .gov government sites and the most popular domain on the Internet, .com, is the ninth riskiest overall.

Other key findings from McAfee's 2008 Mapping the Mal Web report 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 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. [JH]