Site Advisor Highlights Risky Domains
I love the SiteAdvisor utility from McAfee. Site Advisor is like a crash test dummy for the internet, running around, signing up for email subscriptions, downloading files to see if the files are malware, and lots more. My only complaint is it does not work well with Vista. Yet.
But have you ever wondered what the “bad neighborhoods” are on the web? Ever searched for something on Google and clicked a link that hosed your browser or bombed you with Popups? SiteAdvisor will classify your google results as good, bad, unknown, or “I wouldn’t go there if I were you.”
From NewsFactor here:
How can you and your business avoid the riskiest Web sites?
To see the warnings, McAfee is offering SiteAdvisor. SiteAdvisor provides color-based ratings. Risky sites, which fail tests for spyware, adware, viruses, and the like, are given a red rating. A green rating, as any driver knows, means go. Yellow-rated sites require caution, as they pass the tests but still have such annoyances as excessive pop-ups.
About 5.6 percent of sites in the Romania domain (.ro) are risky, as are 4.5 percent in Russia (.ru). If you ever encounter a site ending in .tk, the domain of the tiny island of Tokelau, you might want to surf away as quickly as your browser can move. About 10.1 percent of sites with the Tokelau domain are suspicious, according to McAfee.
Some suspicious domains are not country-based. About 7.5 percent of all sites with .info were judged as risky, as were 5.5 percent of .com sites. Because of the sheer number of .com sites, about 86 percent of red and yellow sites were in that domain. McAfee found that if you give your e-mail address to a site with the .info domain, you have a 73.2 percent chance of getting spam e-mail as a result.
Lest you think the U.S. government has absolutely no redeeming qualities, .gov was the only domain with no risky sites out of the 265 top-level domains tested.
This report, like most from cyber companies is mostly a marketing tool, but the results are useful for those that can filter or blackhole domains in their enterprise. The full report is here. Download SiteAdvisor for all of your browsers here.
