A domain risk assessor owned by McAfee Associates has completed a broad scan of 265 top-level domains, assessing the levels of malicious code found at the different domains. The survey found that 4.1% of all sites tested by SiteAdvisor were "rated red or yellow", but that some TLDs were rated as much riskier than others. The code being searched for included any software which might pose a risk to users, including viruses, adware, spyware, and phishing malware.

Slavic countries and the South Pacific islands were the worst offenders. Russia and Romania were the worst of the larger nations, but tiny islands such as Tokelau (which hands out .tk domains for free) and Samoa were also among the worst offenders. At the other end of the scale, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Ireland were found to be some of the domains least plagued by malware. Australia, Singapore and Canada also did well in this regard.

Unsurprisingly, the rigidly regulated .gov Domain Name, only used for American governmental purposes, was the sole domain scanned for which no problems were recorded. Indeed, this difficulty in obtaining a .gov domain is precisely the reason for its spotless record. Mark Maxwell, senior product manager, at McAfee, says, "There is a direct correlation between the risk of the TLD and the hoops or barriers through which an individual has to go through during domain registration." For example, registering a domain name with the Australian TLD requires not only payment, but verification with the government that the domain is being registered for legitimate business and operates within the nation’s borders. Canada and Finland have similar regulations for registering Domain Names. However, everyone can register a .tk domain name for free, and this has led to exploitation of the TLD by unscrupulous users.

"It’s my guess that this is naiveté on the part of Tokelua," says Maxwell, "not malicious intent. That being said, they are ultimately responsible for whom they are awarding their TLDs to, and managing that."

Russia’s shockingly high percentage of malware on its .ru TLD is a difficult problem to solve. Maxwell suggests that the best way to combat the issue would be to expose the risky nature of the TLD, which might push administrators to clean up their act.

SiteAdvisor offers a free plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox which gives a colour-coded score to a domain to alert the user of its relative danger. The rating is based on SiteAdvisor’s own testing, which involved interacting with thousands of sites worldwide as a user, to see if anything negative happened on visiting and using the sites.