We all know that the internet can be a great place, but as with all things in life it has its dangers. There’s nothing like a little bit of common sense and safe browsing habits that’ll protect you from the worst of it, but you need to be constantly vigilant. McAfee recently did a study surveying the riskiest domain extensions for websites.
According to the security firms annual report, 6.2 percent of websites are dangerous, which is up from 5.8 percent last year.
So who has the riskiest domains?
Well in first place we have Vietnam, with the .vn extension being ranked as the riskiest country level domain. A staggering 59 percent of the countries domains have been marked as dangerous.
And the safest country level domain? It’s the same as last year, Japan .jp
Paula Greve, director of security web research at McAfee Labs said that cyber criminals change tactics very quickly to avoid being caught
“Last year Vietnam’s .VN was a relatively safe domain, and this year it jumped to the third most dangerous domain. Cybercriminals target regions where registering sites is cheap and convenient and pose the least risk of being caught. A domain that’s safe one year can be dangerous the next.
While domains like .vn are becoming more dangerous, Singapore .sg has become much safer, dropping from the 10th most dangerous last year, to number 81 this year. Apparently this is because .sg requires more documentation now to register domains which turns off the cyber criminals.
The one you really need to watch out for now though is .com, according to McAfee, more than 56 percent of all risky websites end in the universal .com extension.
So as usual, just be careful when you’re browsing the web, if it looks risky, it generally is risky.
