The world’s most heavily trafficked Web domain, .COM, is now the riskiest, according to McAfee’s fourth annual Mapping the Mal Web report, which revealed that 56% of all risky sites found ended in .COM.
McAfee analysed more than 27 million websites to uncover which domains are the most dangerous.
The report found that 6.2% of the 27 million websites analysed pose a security risk – up from 5.8% last year.
McAfee Labs director of web security research Paula Greve said cybercriminals target regions where registering sites is cheap and convenient and pose the least risk of being caught. "
The report revealed drastic changes in country domain rankings with .VN (Vietnam) skyrocketing to third place, up from 39th in 2009, with 58% of the country’s registered sites ranked as risky.
By contrast, .SG (Singapore) became safer this year, dropping to the 81st most risky domain from 10th in last year’s report.
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The report named Vietnam (.VN), Cameroon (.CM), Armenia (.AM), Cocos (.CC) and Russia (.RU) as the top five riskiest country Web domains (ranked in most risky order).
Japan (.JP), Catalan (.CAT), Guernsey (.GG), Croatia (.HR) and Ireland (.IE) were named as the top five safest country Web domains (ranked in least risky order).
.TRAVEL and .EDU are the safest top-level domains with less than .05% of sites infected, which is one in 2,000 sites.
