Philippines (.ph) is the fourth riskiest web domain to surf and search

Security has been an issue since the Internet became so popular, especially now with the popularity of Web 2.0 - securing your personal computer or a corporate I.T. infrastructure is no joke. It has been a cat and mouse thing between security providers and cybercriminals. With all due respect, I think the later is winning the game considering that the amount and opportunity losses are increasing every year. Why is this? Cybercriminals continuous to innovate and change their tactics to lure in a many victims as possible. Just to give you an example: If you remember just last year, the riskiest web domain is .hk (Hongkong), now its on 33rd spot. And here's more surprises, Africa's Cameroon (.cm) which didn't even made it to the list last year is now the riskiest web domains to surf and search. And .ph landed fourth riskiest web domain to surf and search. A report called Mapping the Mal Web was released recently by security firm McAfee indicated that .cm is the riskiest with 36.7% overall risk for 2009, followed by .cn (China) with 23.4, then .ws (Samoa) with 18.8%, then by .ph (Philippines) with 13.1% and 5.2% for the former Soviet Union (.su) making the top 5 list of the most dangerous places online. Cameroon, a small African country that borders Nigeria, jumped to the number one spot this year with 36.7 percent of the .cm domain posing a security risk, but did not even make the list last year. Because the domain .cm is a common typo for .com, many cybercriminals set up fake typo-squatting sites that lead to malicious downloads, spyware, adware and other potentially unwanted programs. Following aggressive measures from .hk’s domain managers to clamp down on scam-related registrations last year, Hong Kong fell 33 spots from the most risky domain in 2008 to the 34th most risky domain in 2009. Now only 1.1 percent of .hk sites pose a risk, whereas last year nearly one in five .hk Web sites were risky. Who is the least risky then? .jp (Japan) got .1% making it the least riskiest web domain. Followed by Ie (Ireland) with .1%, .hr (Croatia) with .1%, .lu (Luxembourg) with .1% and .vu (Vanuatu) got .2% Additional findings from the 2009 Mapping the Mal Web report include: - Of the 27 million Web sites and 104 top-level domains McAfee rated for this report, 5.8 percent pose a security risk – that is more than 1.5 million risky Web sites - Sites registered to the Asia-Pacific Web domains are significantly riskier than the overall Web with 13 percent of sites posing a threat. This region includes the second riskiest domain with the People’s Republic of China (.cn), and also, ironically, the safest Web domain with Japan (.jp) - Ireland (.ie) is Europe’s safest Web domain with only .1 percent risky sites McAfee uses McAfee SiteAdvisor technology and data from McAfee TrustedSource technology, to analyze more than 27 million country and generic Web domains and calculated a weighted risk ratio. Now if these figures are accurate - which part of the web's ecosystem should we protect? The user machine? the hosting company? The next question is "Can we really protect the web?"

Source: mb.com.ph