McAfee names Hong Kong most dangerous domain on the Web

Posted on 09-06-2008

Hong Kong domain has jumped 28 places as the most dangerous place to surf and search on the web according to a new McAfee report called “Mapping the Mal Web Revisited”

“Just like the real world, the virtual threats and risks are constantly changing. As our research shows, Web sites that are safe today can be dangerous tomorrow. Surfing the Web based or conventional wisdom is not enough to avoid risk online,” said Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Avert Labs.

The second annual McAfee “Mapping the Mal Web” report into the riskiest and safest places on the Web reveals that 19.2% of all Web sites ending in the “.hk” domain pose a security threat to Web users. (.cn) is second this year with over 11 percent. By contrast (.fi) replaced (.is) as the safest online destination with 0.05%, followed by (.jp).

The most risky generic domain from 2007’s report became more dangerous with 11.8% of all sites ending in .info posing a security threat and is the third most dangerous domain overall while government websites (.gov) remained the safest generic domain. The most popular domain, .com, is the ninth riskiest overall.

Using the award-winning McAfee SiteAdvisor technology, McAfee analyzed 9.9 million heavily trafficked Web sites found in 265 different country (those ending in country letters e.g. Brazil .br) and generic (those ending in .net or .info for example) domains.

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