CYBERSPACE — In a report released Monday, security firm McAfee provides a geographic breakdown of online risks, ranking the “riskiest” countries in terms of the presence of malicious websites.Among the report’s findings, McAfee states that highest risk “large countries” are Romania (.ro, 5.6-percent risky sites) and Russia (.ru, 4.5-percent risky sites); .info is the riskiest of the generic TLDs; and the small island nation of Tokelau (.tk) is the highest risk overall, with a rate of 10.1-percent high-risk sites.

“McAfee has created a guide book to the web’s most dangerous top-level domains,” said Mark Maxwell, senior product manager for McAfee’s Consumer and Small Business unit, according to VNUNet.com.

“When it comes to safety, it turns out that the web is no different than the physical world,” added Maxwell. “There are safe neighborhoods and safe web domains, and there are places no one should ever visit.”

According to the McAfee report, available on SiteAdvisor.com, the company compared the ratings of sites from 265 country-specific TLD (like .nl for the Netherlands) and for general TLDs, and then ranked all the domains by risk level.

The source of the safety assessments is McAfee’s SiteAdvisor database, an index that contains “8.1 million of the most trafficked Web sites,” accounting for “more than 95-percent of Web traffic,” according to the report.

Each domain analyzed by SiteAdvisor is given a color rating to indicate its level of risk following an evaluation that includes both automated and human review of websites, downloads, sign-up forms and feedback from users, site owners and McAfee’s own SiteAdvisor staff.

According to the report, red ratings are given to sites that fail one or more of the tests performed, and yellow ratings are given to “sites that merit caution before using.”

The report states that McAfee measures risk in four ways: “percent of red and yellow rated sites; percent of red and yellow rated sites, of those with tested downloads; percent of red and yellow rated sites, of those with tested e-mail practices; and percent of sites in that domain rated red for exploits.”

Other key findings from the report:

• 4.1-percent of all sites tested by SiteAdvisor are rated red or yellow
• the incidence of red and yellow rated sites varies greatly across TLDs, from Finland’s (.fi) rate of 0.1% to the 10.1% peak for Tokelau
• The five least risky countries are Finland, Ireland (.ie, 0.11-percent), Norway (.no, 0.16-percent), Iceland (.is, 0.19-percent) and Sweden (.se, 0.21-percent).
• of all frequently tested TLDs, only .gov has been found to be free of red and yellow sites (.gov is only available to U.S. government agencies)

Although .com is only the fifth riskiest TLD by percentage/rank, the report states that “its huge popularity magnifies its impact on search and browsing risk dramatically,” and “86.6-percent of clicks to red and yellow rated sites go to .com sites.”

For more information, see the McAfee report on SiteAdvisor.com, available here: http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/map_malweb_mar2007.html