McAfee published the list of some of the riskiest top level domains along with the domains that are known to spread viruses, spywares, viral codes with downloads & malicious emails. This data changes over a period of time, but the data is more or less consistent with last year, 2007. The study encompasses 9.9 million worldwide websites across 265 country wise domains (like .us, .in etc) as well as all the generic top level domains (like .com, .net, .info etc).

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Key findings from the 2008 study for worldwide risky domains.

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This means that 11.73% of all .info websites tested by McAfee were found to be associated with some sort of malicious activities like spreading viruses, spam emails etc. The data also showed that .com & .biz websites showed marginal improvements over last year (i.e. more websites with .com & .biz extensions had been rated risky in 2007 compared to 2008).

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Top 12 domains with malicious download activities.

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The Tuvalu (.tv) domain had been a domain well known for spreading spam emails & download viruses. For a long time, this Top Level Domain allowed for free and anonymous domain registrations. The internet spammers used that feature to create & spread malware. However, a year back the .tv TLD was sold to a Dutch businessman & it now charges for domain registration. It has also stopped ongoing anonymous registrations, thus making a slight improvement in its risk potential.

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Top 5 top level domains ranked as high risk for spreading email viruses & spam emails.

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The .info top level domain still remains the most risky TLD though it showed an overall improvement in its sites. The worst TLDs in terms of spreading viruses though emails & spam emails are the Chinese domains & Hong Kong top level domains with over 39% of sites for the .cn & over 31% for .hk domains tested for email spams & email malwares.

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Top 5 Top Level Domains with Website Exploits.

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Exploits are drive-by downloads from infectious websites. Though the occurrence of exploit websites were found to be less in 2008, the top level domains that remain more prone to such malicious download codes are from the Romanian TLD (.ro). A surfer to a Romanian (.ro) website is 1559% more likely to encounter malicious downloads compared to an average website.

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The methodology & classifications with more in-depth data (of 20 top level domain information) is available on the McAfee Official Website.

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