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McAfee Picks the Most Dangerous TLDs
CWRUisTakingMyMoney writes "Companies that assign addresses for Web sites appear to be cutting corners on security more when they assign names in certain domains than in others, according to a report to be released Wednesday by antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc. McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are .hk, .cn, and .info. Of all .hk sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of .cn sites and 11.7 percent of .info sites that way. A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the .com domain — the world's most popular — were identified as dangerous."
What the heck? The numbers are less than 20%.. would you block out 80% of a TLD?
Is that dangerous to someone running IE on Windows, or dangerous to the person, like scams?
It seems like they kind of mashed the 2 together, but that is McAfee, so I would expect them to exaggerate the dangers of browsing without McAfee.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I wonder where .xxx would've come in if it had been created.
i live in Hong Kong.
.com.hk, we need business registration to get it registered, same goes for .edu.hk, .org.hk etc.
.hk, but i think the HKNIC (i forgot the name..) does have reasonable abuse TOS that these bad things get cancelled... so i would be glad if they could provide us with the domain names they flagged 'dangerous' and let's see how it goes....
here, if we are to register domain names, especially
the possible exception would be
5% seems absurdly high.
I wonder how the 5% was chosen? I mean how does one actually sample this in a meaningful way. For example, suppose one enumerated every possible webpage and sampled those randomly. Or, given that that is impossible, suppose one enumerated every TLD and samlpled those.
This still would not accord with user experience. User experience is you start from some place on the web and click outward following links. Usually the starting place is some aggregator like Google.
Following that kind of trajectory is not the same as uniformly sampling TLDs or webapges, but is how users interact.
I can say with certainty that 5% of the links I click are not "dangerous".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
gnuplot.info?
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Seriously, though, this report doesn't help their credibility.
Why should we care which TLDs are more likely to contain malware? Are we actually going to learn anything from making random correlations like this? Obviously there are also plenty of scammers at "less dangerous" TLDs and plenty of honest folks at the "dangerous" ones, and there are of course vastly more precise ways to determine the safety of a site than by its TLD.
So of what value is this distinction then, apart from an amusing press release to make it look like McAfee is hard at work researching computer security? Are crack houses more likely to have even street numbers? Are blue eyed people more likely to be sex offenders?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
One other interesting note is that .05% of .gov's are listed as dangerous. So is that like from when the www.nsa.gov website left that tracking cookie on your computer or is there a actual government website out there that is actually dangerous to visitors?
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Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors . . .
A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain -- the world's most popular -- were identified as dangerous.
If I recall, when I registered my .com domain name, the only thing I had to verify is that I'm human, via captcha. I can't imagine how they could be less secure for other domains. Perhaps, they do away with the captcha?
I doubt this has anything to do with registrars' verification procedures. If I made a wild a55ed guess to explain this, I'd say many of the .com sites are larger and have better security. Sites on other TLDs are smaller, less secure, and have been hacked.
I wonder if the author's explanation of cutting corners was merely a WAG. Unless I missed something, the author did not provide a citation for this explanation.
I think part of it is marketing research. They know which timeslot, and which show, a particular ad with a particular numbered website is going to appear. The number of hits that they gather off of a numbered website will tell them how effective that particular ad is. That way, they can tweak their marketing strategy: ie. buy more time on certain channels, or in certain time slots, or against certain types of shows.
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