Having examined the behaviour of 8.1 million of the most trafficked web sites for unwanted practices such as excessive pop-ups, browser exploits, downloads containing malware, and spam sent to registered addresses, McAfee is well placed to identify the riskier country domains and global top level domains.
The darker corners of the Internet appear to fall into two categories: small nations with attractive country domains, and nations that already have a sullied reputation when it comes to IT security issues.
The first category includes island nations such as Niue (.nu), Tonga (.to), Tuvalu (.tv), all of which are among the 25 riskiest country codes. It also includes Tokelau (.tk), where over 10 percent of web sites are judged risky by SiteAdvisor.
What's the attraction of .tk domains? They're free, which means the bad guys aren't limited by cost as they register more and more domains in an attempt to stay ahead of blacklisters.
Among the larger countries highlighted by SiteAdvisor are China (.cn), India (.in), Bulgaria (.bg) and Slovakia (.sk). Romania (.ro) and Russia (.ru) are at the top of this group with 5.6 and 4.5 percent risky sites respectively. Eastern Europe has been associated with the darker side of IT for many years.
Which are the safest countries to visit (bearing in mind that the country code at the end of a URL doesn't tell you where the server is located or the nationality of the people behind the site)?
According to SiteAdvisor, it's Finland and Ireland, with just 0.1 percent risky sites. Other Scandinavian countries do well, with Norway, Iceland and Sweden on 0.2 percent.
Among English-speaking nations, Australia manages a creditable 0.2 percent, with the UK clocking a respectable 0.5 percent, Canada on 0.7 percent (we know some of your are Francophone, so please don't be offended by your inclusion in this group) and the US on 2.1 percent.
That puts the US between Bulgaria and Estonia, and the riskiest nation in the Americas. However, it should be noted that most US sites are registered in one of the global top level domains (gTLDs) such as .com or .net.
No results were recorded in Africa or most of the Middle East (Israel is the major exception) due to the small number of domains tested.
So which is the cleanest country code in the Americas? Columbia, on 0.3 percent.
The bottom line? .cc, .cn and .tv are the most consistently risky national domains, while .biz and .info are the worst gTLDs. McAfee notes that .info domains are cheap - often free for the first year - and that "many experts simply assume all blogs from that domain are fake." As for .biz, its name servers update immediately on registration, which is "particularly attractive due to the transient nature of spam and phishing Web sites."
McAfee SiteAdvisor is a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that warns users of the relative safety of the sites they visit and of the links in site results. The full report is available
here.
