Security firm McAfee has announced the results of a research report that creates a global map of the riskiest places to surf and search on the Internet.
The McAfee SiteAdvisor Mapping the Mal Web report analyses and ranks 265 top-level domains including .jp for Japan, .fr for France and .com.
This global portrait estimates 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 has created a guide book to the web’s most dangerous top-level domains,” said Mark Maxwell, senior product manager for McAfee’s Consumer and Small Business unit.
“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.”
The report provides ‘red’, ‘yellow’ or ‘green’ ratings to sites and search results based on proprietary tests of millions of sites representing more than 95% of the trafficked web.
‘Red’ ratings are given to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee’s tests for 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.
The most risky large country domains are Romania with 5.6% risky sites and Russia with 4.5% risky sites. These country domains are also the most likely to host exploit or ‘drive-by-download’ sites.
Some web activities, like registering at a site or downloading a file, are significantly more risky when performed at certain domains.
For example, giving an e-mail address to a random .info domain results in a massive 73.2% chance of receiving spam as a result.
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