Good news & bad news.
According to McAfee Asia runs the gamut from the world’s safest (.JP) to the riskiest domains (.VN).
The riskiest country to visit — on the Web?
McAfee just released its newest malware mapping report, where it checks out malicious sites by “top level domain,” generic ones like .com, plus all of those country-specific ones, such as .us. Though .com is still the place you can find the most malware, the two countries market in bright red by the security firm are Vietnam (.vn) and Cameroon (.cm). The safest country is Japan (.jp).
When it comes to generic domains, .com was the worst, but partly because it’s so huge: 56 percent of sites deemed risky are in the .com domain. Scarier is .info, which seems like it’s mostly a haven for creeps. The squeaky-cleanest domains are .edu and .travel.
The report confirms that the overall Web is getting riskier: 6.2 percent of websites on the Web as a whole are considered “risky,” up from 5.8 percent last year.
For the .vn domain, 58 percent of sites are risky. But when that is weighted in the overall picture, by comparing the sheer number of risky .vn sites to all risky sites on the Web, it goes down, by a tad. It’s still nasty, so stay away! Ditto for .cm, which is 44.2 percent risky.
What defines risky? The presence of excessive pop-ups, phishing scams or browser exploits. These include enabling viruses, keystroke logging and spyware. McAfee also tracks links to see if they direct people to other known sketchy sites.
Reports McAfee: “Vietnam (.vn) moved from number 39 riskiest in 2009 to third riskiest in 2010. The predominant risks associated with .vn relate to malicious activity, sites being used to proxy to other malicious hosts, as well as command-and-control activity.”
I have a few questions about these findings however as someone who owns a few .VN names and knows a little about this…
While it is easy to believe there are lots of pop-ups, scams and exploits on .VN domains as a percentage, relative to small number of domains they represent. I hardly think they are a huge global threat.
Other articles like this one suggest another possibility that .VN names and sites targeting Vietnamese may be something of a battleground for pro- and anti-government hackers:
DDoS Trojan Attacks Sites That Criticize Vietnamese Communist Party
“There is some evidence that these current attacks are being perpetrated by a pro-communist hacking group,” the report says.
The original McAfee report goes on to explain:
McAfee, Inc. Reveals the Riskiest Web Domains to Surf and Search
“This report underscores how quickly cybercriminals change tactics to lure in victims and avoid being caught,” said Paula Greve, director of web security research for McAfee Labs™. “Last year Vietnam’s .VN was a relatively safe domain, and this year it jumped to the third most dangerous domain. Cybercriminals target regions where registering sites is cheap and convenient and pose the least risk of being caught. A domain that’s safe one year can be dangerous the next.”
It seems plausible that .VN domains are not well policed and do not pose a huge risk of getting caught. But cheap and convenient?
For starters .VN is anything but cheap!
- The established price to register any .COM.VN, .NET.VN , .ORG.VN… extension domain name has been set initially at $100.00 per name per year. Domain name registrations are processed immediately and are non-refundable.
- The established price to register the 2nd level of .VN extension domain name has been set initially at $200.00 per name per year. Domain names are processed immediately and are non-refundable
https://www.dot.vn/vnnic/vnnic/faqs.jsp
Convenient is also debatable.
More importantly however, I don’t think it is fair to blame the country or the Domains for the misuse of some bad actors who in many (most?) cases are probably not from Vietnam.
Why do I say this? As McAfee states: pose the least risk of being caught.
For scammers from Russia or or anywhere else, the short arm of Vietnamese law probably poses little risk and the naivety of Vietnamese users probably provides an ample pool of potential suckers.
However law-breakers in Vietnam face an altogether different picture, in a country where bloggers may be imprisoned almost at will and any serious infraction may have dire consequences… (http://www.nswccl.org.au/issues/death_penalty/asiapac.php#vietnam)
So give Vietnam a little break please. Yes they need to clean up their act administratively on domain management, but at the end of the day I think the Vietnamese are probably the victims here, targeted and taken advantage of by more sophisticated criminal elements…
