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The Most Dangerous Addresses On the Web?


Those two or three letters that go after the dot on a Web address -- you know, .com, .gov, .edu, and so on -- actually mean something. They identify the top level domain (TLD) that a site is on. It would seem that pretty much all those TLDs are more or less the same, but it looks like some domains harbor more malicious sites than others, according to a new report by security software vendor McAfee.

The most common top-level domain is .com, which has just over 5-percent malicious sites (sites that are used for spamming, hacking, phishing, and virus-spreading). Other domains contain significantly higher percentages of dangerous sites: 19.2 percent of .hk (Hong Kong) sites were found to be dangerous, while just under 12 percent of .cn (China) and .info (Information) sites were.

Primarily, this has to do with the rules governing the domains and the lack of proper security checks by some of the companies that that administer TLDs and let people register Web addresses with them. One analyst at McAfee suggests avoiding .hk, .cn, and .info sites... especially those hawking pharmaceuticals.

The safest domain by far was .gov, which McAfee found only .05 percent of to be dangerous. So until more international hackers infiltrate US government Web sites, you should be okay visiting most anything with a .gov in the address. [Source: AOL News/AP and Newsvine]

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