Dangerous Places...

June 2008

New report identifies dangerous Web domains. Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, according to a report to be released Wednesday by antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc. McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are “.hk” (Hong Kong), “.cn” (China) and “.info” (information). Of all “.hk” sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of “.cn” sites and 11.7 percent of “.info” sites that way. A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the “.com” domain – the world’s most popular – were identified as dangerous. More spammers, malicious code writers and other cybercriminals can establish an online presence when domain name registry businesses cut requirements for registering a site in order to boost their profit and profile. The report does not identify domain name registration companies McAfee believes are responsible for those lapses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies register domain names; some are large and well known, while others are small and less reputable, offering their services cheaply and with flimsy or no background checks to lure in more customers. The McAfee report is based on results from 9.9 million Web sites that were tested in 265 domains for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.