GILLIAN SHAW
Sun
SECURITY If you want to stay out of trouble on the World Wide Web, steer clear of Romania and Russia.
These two countries, found at websites ending in . ro for Romania and . ru for Russia, are the r i s k i e s t fo r l a rge country domains, according to a survey by McAfee SiteAdvisor, a service of security technology company McAfee Inc.
But while Russian and Romanian sites are dicey, there’s an even more dangerous place in cyberspace — and that originates with Tokelau, a tiny island of coral reef formations north of Western Samoa identified on the Web by its domain “. tk”.
A whopping 10 per cent of all websites ending in . tk lead to pages that are filled with malware — malicious software that can infiltrate a computer and wreak havoc.
The SiteAdvisor codes sites with green ( clear of malware), yellow ( be cautious) or red ( don’t go there) and also ranks domains — both those that are countrybased and others such as the generic . com.
These ratings might make you want to pull the plug on the Internet, but Mark Maxwell, senior product manager for McAfee SiteAdvisor, said that risky websites represent only a small percentage of total Internet traffic.
“ Our fundamental belief is that the Internet is a great thing and should be open to everyone and safe to everyone. But the reality is there are different neighbourhoods, if you will, where users should proceed with caution,” he said.
Those are the neighbourhoods McAfee SiteAdvisor found when it crawled to the darkest and seediest corners of the Web and came back with a warning for surfers about where they are most likely to run into the ripoffs, the spyware, the spam, viruses and other maleficent mischiefmakers who populate cyberspace.
While the SiteAdvisor, which is a real- time, free service for consumers , found the horror hotspots on the Web, they only amounted to 4.1 per cent of all the sites tested, meaning the majority of websites get a green rating and are not considered risky.
Want to play it safe? Stick to Finland at . fi, or Ireland at . ie — both domains were found to have the lowest ranking when it comes to websites that are responsible for spyware, spam and other scams.
Among the generic domains, . info is the worst. An e- mail address given to a random . info website gives you a 73- per- cent chance of receiving spam in your e- mail inbox.
The ubiquitous . com address is the second- riskiest generic domain. Among the . com sites registered, some 5.5 per cent we re p e g g e d a s r i s k y by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor.
North American domains are relatively safe, with the survey finding less than one per cent of sites in Canada earning a red or yellow rating. The U. S. came in with the most questionable sites in the region — 2.1 per cent.
Maxwell said the safety ratings on country domains can be attributed to the regulations, or the lack thereof, surrounding registration. He used the examples of Australia and Singapore, which he said have among the most stringent registration rules, requiring applicants for websites using their country domains to prove who they are and why they should be allowed to use that domain in their web address. There is also a cost associated with it.
By comparison, anyone who wants to register a website address using the freewheeling Tokelau domain of . tk, can do so without authorities asking them difficult questions.
“ Guess where the bad guys are going to want to go. Where it is easiest for them to set up camp,” said Maxwell.
In Canada, registration for the . ca domain was administered by volunteers at the University of B. C. starting in 1988. But as the Internet grew and became more commercialized, that task was turned over to the not- for- profit Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which is responsible for operating the . ca Internet country code Top Level Domain. A TDL is the last part of an Internet domain name, and can include such classifications as a country code and generic TDLs covering everything from . com to . gov to . biz, . edu, and many others.
CIRA registration has an extensive list of rules, policies and procedures for individuals, businesses and organizations wanting to use the . ca designation. They are on the Web at www. cira. ca/ en/ documents/ 2007/ PRP- registrationrulesv3.8. pdf.