Hong Kong's ".hk" Labeled Most Dangerous Domain By McAfee

According to McAfee's annual assessment of the riskiest and safest places in cyberspace Hong Kong and China are the "most dangerous" places to surf the Web based on country domain.

The report, based on the Web-crawling and analysis technologies that power McAfee's SiteAdvisor tool for safe Web surfing, looked at 9.9 million heavily trafficked Web sites in 265 countries ending in country domain codes, such as .br for Brazil.

"We looked at the major categories, including exploits by drive-by downloads, spam, and downloads that come with malware such as viruses," says McAfee analyst Shane Keats about the security company's new report, titled "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited." He describes the report as a bit like a "Lonely Planet" travel guide for the Web, adding, "Danger on the Web is very fluid."

The world’s most dangerous overall country web domains:

1. Hong Kong (.hk)
2. PR of China (.cn)
3. Philippines (.ph)
4. Romania (.ro)
5. Russia (.ru)

The world's safest overall country web domains:

1. Finland (.fi)
2. Japan (.jp)
3. Norway (.no)
4. Slovenia (.si)
5. Colombia (.co)

The most risky generic domain from 2007's report became more dangerous with 11.8% of all sites ending in .info posing a security threat and is the third most dangerous domain overall while government websites (.gov) remained the safest generic domain. The most popular domain, .com, is the ninth riskiest overall. The full McAfee "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited" report is available for download at http://www.mcafee.com/advice.

Other key findings from McAfee "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited" report 2008 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 Philippines (.ph) experienced a 270% increase in overall riskiness
• Tokelau (.tk) and Samoa (.ws) were notably safer in 2008 dropping to 28th and 12th
• In Europe, Spain (.es) experienced a 91% increase in overall risk