In a June 4 press release, McAfee, a world leader in antivirus, firewall, and Internet security software, reported its latest findings of most dangerous and most secure web sites. McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate are ".hk" (Hong Kong), ".cn" (China) and ".info"(information).
The second annual McAfee "Mapping the Mal Web" report into 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 with 11.8%. Romania (.ro) and Russia (.ru) remained in the top five most dangerous places with 6.75% and 6% of their web sites ranked as risky. By contrast, Finland (.fi) is the safest online destination with 0.05%, followed by Japan (.jp) and Australia (.au).
The most risky generic domain is ".info" which is also the third most dangerous domain overall, while government web sites (.gov) remained the safest generic domain. The most popular domain, .com, is the ninth riskiest overall.
McAfee analyzed 9.9 million heavily trafficked web sites found in 265 different country. The study compared the ratings of sites found in each of the 265 country and generic domains and ranked them by the number of risky web sites found in each domain that contained adware, spyware, viruses, spam, excessive pop-ups, browser exploits or links to other red-rated sites.
The report also found that the chance of downloading spyware, adware, viruses or other unwanted software from surfing the web increased 41.5% over 2007. Additionally, sites which offer downloads such as ring tones and screen savers that are also loaded with viruses, spyware and adware increased over the last year from 3.3% to 4.7%.
McAfee "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited" report is available online.
Feeds