The Big Bad Web: World's Riskiest Websites.

SiteAdvisor, a web security firm owned by McAfee, recently released a study of the riskiest websites in the world. Here’s some of their key findings:

4.1% of all sites tested by SiteAdvisor are rated red or yellow. But the incidence of red and yellow sites varies dramatically across top-level domains, ranging from a low of 0.1% for Finland (.fi) to a high of 10.1% for the tiny island of Tokelau (.tk). We find that Tokelauan domains, discussed later, offer some advantages to scammers.

– The most risky large countries are Romania (.ro, 5.6% risky sites) and Russia (.ru, 4.5% risky sites). These country TLDs are also
the most likely to host exploit sites.

– .info is the riskiest generic TLD, with 7.5% of its sites rated as risky. .com is the second most risky generic TLD, with 5.5% of sites rated as risky.

– Four of the five least risky country TLDs are Nordic countries – Finland (0.10%), Norway (.no, 0.16%), Sweden (.se, 0.21%) and Iceland (.is, 0.19%). Ireland (.ie, 0.11%) rounds out the top five least risky country TLDs.

– .gov is the only frequently tested TLD for which SiteAdvisor has found no risky sites. .gov is only available to United States government agencies.

Link – via David Kaplan’s Bad Guys blog – Thanks Dave!