Surf between the flags

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 March 2007 12:15

Your IT - Home IT

Just as swimmers on Australian beaches are advised by lifeguards to swim between the flags, McAfee's SiteAdvisor service has warned web surfers that some virtual areas are safer than others.

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)?