Riskiest Domains 2008: .Hk and .Cn

McAfee - a leading maker of computer protection software - released it's second "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited" report. The new number one least safe top-level domain (TLD)? Hong Kong (.hk). Over 19% of all sites with the .hk domain pose a threat to web viewers. China (.cn) is second with 11.8%. .info is third and is the riskiest generic TLD - generic defined as not associated with a specific country, such as .com or .net.

The report says that overall risk has remained constant from last year to this, but some aspects of online life have become more risky in nature - such as email registrations. The data was distilled down from 265 TLD's and almost 10 Million websites into a list of 74 TLDs with at least 2000 sites for analysis.

The safest generic TLD's are:

Government (.gov) 0.05% posing a threat

Education (.edu) 0.44%

Organization (.org) 2.32%

While the overall risk associated with using websites with these domains remains low, each experienced an increase in the threat posted over last year. Given only government entities use the .gov domain and only educational entities use the .edu domain, it isn't entirely surprising that these domains would be relatively low in McAffe's threat assessment, however the opposite point - "why are there any at all" - is also quite valid.

From the .gov registrar, the domain registration is $125 yearly - so the cost associated with simply registering a domain would seem reasonably prohibitive, but more than that they are quite specific that "eligibility is limited to qualified government organizations and programs." In other words, it is a highly managed TLD.

And generally speaking, highly managed TLDs mean fewer riskier sites: .jp (Japan) is the second safest TLD.

McAfee used a 4-pronged analysis of risk, using a "red" (If a site failed a test for unwanted behavior) or "yellow" code (if a site merits caution before using). It would seem likely that the .edu and .gov domains probably wouldn't have failed tests such as browsing exploits or phishing, so it would be more likely that some sites using those TLDs simply require caution rather than representing actual risk. There are some other criticisms of the methodology as well: for instance, overly aggressive pop up ads are considered an equivalent risk to unwanted software downloads.

Other tidbits include an increase of the risk of downloading unwanted software from the web increased by over 40% last year and the presence of exploit code remains low at 0.07%.