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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."
Home of the goatse. Danger Will Robinson!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
What the heck? The numbers are less than 20%.. would you block out 80% of a TLD?
5% of .coms, or 19% of .hk's? On a percentage basis, the .hk, .info, etc. But as a whole, my money's on .com's?.
Bad math = bad reporting.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
...would anyone want to take security advice from McAffe?
There is a war going on for your mind.
"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"
um since when is that the registrar's responsibility? they just point a domain name at an IP address-- that's the extent of the service.
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 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
Not even the malware folks can get a decent domain in .com anymore, they're all in use or squatted upon.
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I'd bet if they would find an even better correlation if they looked at the age of the website's domain registration, not the domain it was registered under.
The thing is far from foolproof. When I was bored one day I decided to start clicking on just about all the Google Adwords adverts I could find. Most of them were for those scam sites, you know the kind "click here to buy Firefox, Buy supsciption to Bittorent now!" Over half the sites were green according to Site Advisor. Really I'm sure that their numbers here at least give an idea as the how "dangrous" these TDLs are, put really they are liekly far off from the truth.
The problem with .cn domains: 30 minutes after you surf there, you want to surf there again...
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.
Bad math = bad reporting. When solving a word problem, one must find the mathematical expression that best expresses the question. You've got the wrong one.
You're making the argument that what really matters is the total number of malicious sites in each domain, not the fraction of sites within a domain that are malicious.
Clearly, however, the fraction is the more important metric. Consider a silly analogy:
There are 100 violent criminals in my local jail out of a total population of 200. There are 1000 violent criminals running free in Hawaii out of a total population of 1 million. When choosing a safer place for a vacation, by your logic, I'd pick my jail, since the total number of offenders is lower. 50% of my fellows would be violent criminals. By my logic, I'd pick Hawaii, where there would be more criminals, but they'd only make up 0.1% of the people around me. I prefer my odds.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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?
Home of the complete goatse collection. Enjoy yourselves!
...would a link to the full set of Goatse pictures be moderated "Interesting"
I think it's cute how you still think any of the TLDs are still used for their originally intended purposes.
Don't forget .ng (Nigeria). I don't think anything good ever comes from that domain.
.no - Norway
.sh - Saint Helena
.it - Italy
sherlock
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Um, no. You are exactly wrong, in fact. It is true that there are a greater quantity of troublesome .ru sites in your example, but given a .ru domain and a .hk domain, the .hk domain is more likely to be troublesome. The fact that there are more .ru troublesome sites out there is only a result of there being more .ru sites out there. The only thing that affects is the likelihood that a given domain is a .ru domain.
.xy domain is dangerous?
Consider this:
Bag 1: 7 of 10 marbles are blue
Bag 2: 35 of 100 marbles are blue
There are more blue marbles in bag 2, but you are far more likely to pick a blue marble in the first bag.
The point of the article is: how much of an indication is it that a