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The world’s riskiest domains

Friday, December 4th, 2009

McAfee just released their Mapping the Mal Web report (PDF 4.78MB) which lists the world’s riskiest domains for nasty malware and phishing.

McAfee rated more than 27 million domains in the report and the results are interesting:

  • 5.8% of all websites are rated as risky. This is up from 4.1% in 2008;
  • The top 5 riskiest domain are:
    • .CM
      The Cameroon domain space is a common typo for .COM and the report found “significant malware activity”.
    • .COM
      The world’s largest and busiest domain.
    • .CN
      China’s domain space is growing rapidly.
    • .WS
    • .INFO
  • The top 5 least risky domains are:
    • .GOV
    • .EDU
    • .IE
    • .HR
  • Last years riskiest domain space, .HK has improved dramatically due to enhanced fraud processing;
  • Australia’s .AU is one of the world’s safest domain spaces.
  • Social networking sites represent an increased risk for hacking and virus attacks as they gain in popularity and change user behaviour.

The world can often be a risky place and the web is no exception. If you’re sensible then you should be fine on the streets and on the web. We recommend:

  • Never click a link from someone you don’t know or trust;
  • Register your brand in all major spaces to prevent squatters;
  • Change your passwords often, particularly on social networking sites;
  • Use an up-to-date virus scanning tool.
Jonothan Stribling works with all things web for registerfree.com and can be found on twitter at@jonstribling and @registerfree. He also blogs occasionally at http://www.jonstribling.info/

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