The Most Risky Web Locales
June 4th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 4 Comments
Where should you be careful when you’re online? That’s the question that McAfee Research has tackled in its newly released report The Most Dangerous Domains to Surf and Search on the Web. The report seeks to pin down which general types of domains give you a good chance of picking up malware, and gets into which parts of the world those domains are usually associated with.
According to McAfee’s research the Hong Kong (.hk) domain “has jumped 28 places as the most dangerous place to surf and search on the web.” Interestingly, the previous place that topped the list was Tokelau, a tiny island of 1,500 inhabitants in the South Pacific. It can’t be too tough to track down the hackers there.
Digging deeper into McAfee’s research, the company found that 19.2 percent of all web sites ending the .hk domain–nearly one in five–posed a security threat for users. Of course, whenever the security companies release this kind of data they’re non-specific about what they deem to actually be a threat, so I take the numbers with a grain of salt. The general trends are usually reliable, though.
See if you can guess which domain type has the fewest number of sites likely to pose a security threat. That’s right, .gov government sites get the nod there. The most popular of all domains, of course, is .com, and it is ninth on the list of riskiest domain types.
Among country domains Romania (.ro) and Russia (.ru) remained in the top five most dangerous places with 6.75 percent and 6 percent of their web sites ranked as risky while country domains like Japan (.jp) and Australia (.au) remained safe surfing environments.
One of the biggest findings in McAfee’s study matches up with the results from a number of independent studies: Your risk of getting infected by visiting a web site is rapdily rising. McAfee’s study found that the chance of downloading spyware, adware, viruses or other unwanted software from surfing the web increased 41.5 percent over last year. That’s a big change from the days when most malware arrived in e-mail attachments. Surf safely!
4 Comments Post your own comment
rick says: June 4th, 2008 4:40pm
useless study though and, please, do a little more analysis. The risk of getting infected went up 45%!! Oh noes!! Except, according to an information week article and the study:
“The overall prevalence of exploit code on Web sites — one factor of several used to calculate overall risk– remains relatively low at 0.07%.”
.07%!? um… so it was about .05% and now it’s .07%? Sigh…
Yeah, keep your AV software up to date and use good security practices. But let’s not get all alarmist.
Joel Falconer says: June 4th, 2008 5:12pm
Interesting stuff. I wonder where the best balance between monitoring domain registrations and retaining internet privacy and freedom lies? It’s a tricky question, one that’s likely to step on people’s toes on both sides of the debate.
Points of Interest for the 6th of June, 2008 | Joel Falconer says: June 6th, 2008 7:34am
[...] The Most Risky Web Locales by Samuel Dean: Where should you be careful when you’re online? That’s the question that McAfee Research has tackled in its newly released report The Most Dangerous Domains to Surf and Search on the Web. The report seeks to pin down which general types of domains give you a good chance of picking up malware, and gets into which parts of the world those domains are usually associated with. [...]
EFlight says: June 9th, 2008 5:32pm
Where can one get hold of this list?