In association with heise online

28 March 2007, 15:17

Study: Surfing particularly dangerous in certain domains

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At the moment, surfing to Finnish web pages and official US government pages appears to be safest, according to McAffee's study based on the tool SiteAdvisor, a free browser tool which indicates the potential malicious risk of a web site based on ratings established by McAffee.

Only 0.1 per cent of the web servers accessible through the Finnish top level domain .fi were suspect, exploiting security holes to infect computers. Visitors of Finnish pages are also not generally subjected to an excessive amount of pop up banners, adware and spyware. Furthermore, only very few spam mails are said to originate in Finland. There is no danger from servers in the .gov domain, which is hardly surprising since this domain is used exclusively by the US government and US government agencies.

Nerves of steel are required to visit a server within the domain of the Tokelau Islands (.tk). About 10 per cent of the pages hassle visitors or are involved in other questionable activities. The adventuresome should, however, visit servers within the Romanian (.ro) and Russian (.ru) domains. According to McAffee, just under five per cent of these servers attempt to slip unwanted programmes into visitors' systems; these findings differ from Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, where Russia didn’t even rank in the top ten for “malicious activity”.

If you have always complained about not receiving enough emails, you should register your address on a server within the .info domain. Since 73 per cent of these servers are said to be involved in spamming activities, your empty inboxes should soon become a thing of the past. .biz pages also have a particularly high malicious potential since their registration requires hardly any checks, which makes them very readily available. According to McAffee, these domains are, therefore, among the favourites with spammers in their race against anti-spamming services. Insufficient domain monitoring and the possibility of registering URLs at little or even no cost is viewed by McAffee as one of the reasons for high risks with some domains. In the study’s risk assessment, the UK only ranks 51st.

(mba)

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