Islands and Ireland show internet extremes

13-03-2007

by Maxim Kelly

Ireland has the third-safest internet domain name (dot-ie) in the world, according to security giant McAfee.

The top-level domain (TLD) name for government agencies (dot-gov) is the safest domain in terms of worldwide risk assessment which measured the probability of malicious software or nuisance features such as annoying pop-up windows appearing in 256 top-level domains.

The SiteAdvisor survey, called Mapping the Mal Web, tested 8.1 million of the most-visited websites which represent more than 95 percent of overall web traffic, according to McAfee.

Just over 4 percent of the 71 TLDs tested were recorded to have some form of risk, with dot-ie scoring 0.11 percent -- just behind dot-gov's perfect zero percent score and Finland's 0.10 percent.

Romanian (dot-ro) and Russian (dot-ru) domains were deemed the dodgiest -- scoring 5.6 percent and 4.5 percent respectively. Indeed McAfee pointed out that a consumer is almost 12 times more likely to encounter an unwanted 'drive-by-download' while surfing Russian domains compared to Columbian sites.

Four of the five least risky country TLDs are Nordic countries: Finland (0.10 percent); Norway (0.16 percent); Sweden (0.21 percent); and Iceland (0.19 percent).

Within the McAfee survey, the report authors deliberately left some important geography-related questions unanswered, such as: should online consumers factor in this TLD safety information when searching and surfing? And: what level of online risk is involved as an ever greater percentage of the world's population moves online and users seek out websites in their native languages?

The authors did however point out some interesting talking points: 5.2 percent of Vietnamese websites have risky downloads, while -- not a million miles away -- only 0.5 percent of Singaporean sites host such files.

Casual web surfers visit Dutch sites deemed risky 2.7 million times per month, whereas in Hong Kong -- which has the same percentage of crooked sites -- these domains receive only 52,000 clicks per month.

Disregarding territorial TLDs for a moment, dot-info is the riskiest generic domain with 7.5 percent of its sites noted as bad eggs. Not surprisingly the most popular domain name -- dot-com -- scored a higher than average 5.5 percent.

However, even though the dot-com TLD is only the 5th most risky TLD by rank, its huge popularity magnifies its impact on search and browsing risk dramatically. The report said 86.6 percent of clicks to sites they rate as the most dangerous go to dot-com sites.

The McAfee report also notes that the international domain dot-biz is said by ICANN to be the most popular TLD for spammers because the servers that run this domain update immediately. This means spammers can begin using their spurious domain names as soon as they register rather than wait 24 hours for the application to be processed.

Back to territorial domains and the real ones to watch out for are a variety of Caribbean and Pacific islands. Sao Tome / Principe (dot-st), Tokelu (dot-tk), the Turks and Caicos (dot-tc), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (dot-gs), and the British Virgin Islands (dot-vg) all score on average above 11 percent.