Surf between the flags

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 March 2007 12:15

Your IT - Home IT

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.