Hong Kong (.hk) domain has jumped 28 places as the most dangerous place to surf and search on the web according to a new McAfee, Inc. In its report called “Mapping the Mal Web Revisited,” Hong Kong takes the lead from Tokelau, a tiny island of 1,500 inhabitants in the South Pacific.

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(1) to web users. China (.cn) is second this year with over 11%. After China is Philippines (.ph), Romania (.ro), and Russia (.ru). By contrast Finland (.fi) replaced Ireland (.is) as the safest online destination with 0.05%, followed by Japan (.jp), Norway (.no), Slovenia (.sl), and Colombia (.co).

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.

McAfee analyzed 9.9 million heavily trafficked web sites found in 265 different country and generic domains. The study compared the ratings of sites found in each of the 265 country and generic domains and ranked them by the number of risky web sites found in each domain that contained adware, spyware, viruses, spam, excessive pop-ups, browser exploits or links to other red-rated sites.

Related posts:

1. McAfee study reveals dangers of search engine use
2. AOL launches in Hong Kong
3. Sedo doubles domain name sales revenues in 2007
4. Register.com partners with Fabulous.com to expand availability of premium domain names
5. .asia domain opens with 300,000 domain applications

Do you like this article? Submit it to Blogosphere News!