McAfee representatives have announced the results of a research report of the riskiest places to surf and search on the internet. They made a research report that creates a global map for the riskiest 265 domains including .jp for Japan, .fr for France and .com, with the help of McAfee SiteAdvisor. Mark Maxwell, senior product manager for McAfee's Consumer and Small Business unit stated: "McAfee has created a guide book to the web's most dangerous top-level domains. When it comes to safety, it turns out that the web is no different than the physical world. There are safe neighbourhoods and safe web domains, and there are places no one should ever visit".
Red, yellow or green ratings are associated to millions of sites representing more than 95 per cent of the trafficked web. Red ratings are given to risky sites which contain adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spam, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other 'red' rated sites. Yellow ratings are given to sites which pass McAfee's safety tests but which still have nuisances, such as excessive pop-ups, warranting a user advisory. Green rated sites pass all of these tests.
It has been shown that internet users make more than 550 million clicks to risky websites every month, and that even relatively safe domains like .de for Germany and .co.uk for the UK account for millions of risky clicks. McAfee found no risky websites for US government agencies. For a change, one in 10 sites that end in dot-tk, the domain for the tiny island of Tokelau, either spread malicious software or warrant a warning because of pop-ups or other nuisances. The most risky large country domains are Romania with 5.6 per cent risky sites and Russia with 4.5 per cent risky sites. These country domains are also the most likely to host exploit or 'drive-by-download' sites. Some of the results are suspicious. For example, the .com domain is only the fifth most risky and its huge popularity magnifies its impact dramatically. While dot-com is the most popular generic domain, it is not the riskiest one
Overall, 4.1 per cent of tested websites require a warning, site representatives said. According to the McAfee report it is safer to surf to websites in the domains for Finland (dot-fi), Ireland (dot-ie) and Norway (dot-no).which had 0.10 per cent, 0.11 per cent and 0.16 per cent, respectively, raising concerns.
The company warned about low or no-cost domain registration and minimal domain oversight, which appear to drive at least some of the higher levels of risk found at some top-level domains. For instance, the .biz domain seems to be preferred by spammers because the domains are available for immediate use. They do not havea typical 24-hour waiting period which is considered to be a critical advantage in beating anti-spam services and blacklists.