According to a report that is to be released on Wednesday by McAfee Inc, .hk or Hong Kong domains were found to be the most dangerous domains on the web out of a total of 9.9 million websites that were tested on 265 different domains. The domains were tested for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.
Here some other stats that come straight out of the report.
- 19.2 percent of .hk domains were found as dangerous
- 11.8 percent of .cn or China domains were flagged as dangerous
- 11.7 percent of .info sites were flagged as dangerous
- 5 percent of .com sites were identified as dangerous
- 6.8 percent of .ro (Romania) domains were flagged as dangerous
- 6 percent of .ru (Russian) domains were flagged as dangerous
The report did not identify the domain registrars responsible for allowing these malicious domains to be registered.
I’ve personally noticed with my own blog that the majority of sploggers I see scraping my content are on .info domains. I’ve been told that .info domains are the cheapest ones to purchase at the moment which why they have become so popular amongst the malicious users. Every now and then, I’ve seen .cn domains ripping my content but they have been far and few between. Have you experienced something similar?
As for domains which had the least amount of dangerous sites attributed to them.
- .gov (government use) 0.05 percent
- .jp (japan) 0.1 percent flagged
- .au (Austrailia) 0.3 percent flagged