Antivirus software company McAfee Inc. released a report highlighting the danger of three top-level domains: dot-hk (Hong Kong), dot-cn (China) and dot-info.
The danger levels break down like this:
• Of all dot-hk sites, McAfee flagged 19.2 percent of them as dangerous or potentially dangerous.
• Of all dot-cn sites, 11.8 percent raised red flags.
• Of all dot-info sites, 11.7 percent raised red flags.
Five percent of the world’s most popular top-level domain — dot-com — were marked as dangerous or potentially dangerous.
The least risky top-level domains were dot-gov, dot-jp (Japan) and dot-au (Australia).
McAfee blamed the large number of dangerous websites on lax domain-registry requirements for the three most dangerous top-level domains.
Online guru Brandon Shalton agreed, though he noted that the sheer cheapness of these domains makes them attractive to spammers.
“To me, whenever I see a dot-info website, I think the site is just junk,” said Shalton, who founded traffic-analysis service T3Report.com. “And that would mean that dot-info is not what they probably intended when ICANN created it.”
On top of that, Shalton said that one of the most “questionable” domain registries is also the first one: Network Solutions. According Shalton, if a user checks the availability of a domain name at Network Solutions, the company puts a hold on the domain so that the user can't then buy the domain from another registry.
"They call this a service for their customers, but its clearly anticompetitive," he said. The service eventually drew a class-action lawsuit against Network Solutions.
So how is a webmaster to stay safe online? Shalton suggested staying at the top of the top-level domains: dot-com. He also added that despite the efforts of Internet officials to encourage uniform usage of top-level domains — dot-com for commercial entities or dot-org for organizations, for example — only dot-edu and dot-gov retained their integrity.
"Dot-com is where it is at," he said. "All these other top-level domains are just ways to make more money for registries."