McAfees second annual report identifies domains populated with the highest concentration of risky sites, with 19.2 percent of checked .hk sites found to be dangerous or potentially dangerous. Other potentially dangerous sites are .cn (11.8 percent) and .info (11.7 percent). Lax security has led to websites ending with .hk and .cn earning notoriety as the internets most dangerous domains to navigate, according to a report by America-based antivirus software vendor McAfee Inc. Domain name registrars with strict checks see far fewer malicious websites, said Shane Keats, lead author of the report...
The safest sites are .gov which are for government use with 0.05 percent, .jp (Japan) with 0.1 percent and .au (Australia) with 0.3 percent. Some 61,572 domain names ending with .hk have been registered, according to the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company, a nonprofit outfit responsible for issuing .hk web domains.
Maren Leizaola, who runs online services company HK.COM, said the HKDNRs lax policy in order to promote the citys own domain name was short- sighted. Leizaola said Russia-based spammers and online pharmacies out of Canada have flocked to the relatively unregulated domain name to establish their online presence. The ".hk" domain was also attractive to online scammers as the city's reputation as a trade hub lent a veneer of legitimacy to cyber criminals, he said.
A HKDNR spokeswoman, however, said the websites tested in the report several months ago no longer exist, as the company has suspended more than 10,000 suspicious domains. She added HKDNR now has some of the most stringent policies and tightened measures in place to minimize incidences of security risks.
Internet Society Hong Kong chairman Charles Mok Nai-kwong was also skeptical of the report. "The findings are quite unbeliev Leg 1able. Hong Kong is a relatively smaller market compared with some of the other countries mentioned in the study, so one wonders if they did the study looking at absolute numbers, or whether there was a proportionate approach taken," he said.
Registration for ".com.hk" requires a business registration certificate and for the owner to be a Hong Kong registered company, HKDNR said. Applicants for ".hk" need only pay a fee, but are subject to random checks. Internet Professional Association chief executive Gary Chao said ".hk" and ".cn" domain names were popular with small to medium sized enterprises that had limited budgets and were reluctant to invest in security. McAfee tested 9.9 million websites.
Source: McAfee's Second Annual Report - Posted by RolandG. Buck - Chief Editor for DomainNews.com - June 5th, 2008