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Cameroon, with a country domain of “.cm,” is the most dangerous place to go on the web, according to AV company McAfee.

The McAfee researchers checked over 27 million sites worldwide and found 5.8 percent contained malicious mechanisms (browser exploits, excessive pop-up windows, malicious downloads or phishing). They found that 36.7 percent of the domains in Cameroon carried such malcode.

McAfee theorized that malicious operators choose Cameroon for their sites because the domain “.cm” would be where potential victims could end up if they mistyped a URL, leaving the “o” out of “.com.” Setting up sites with similar URLs to take advantage of such errors is called “typo squatting.”

The top five (bad) domains were:

— Cameroon “.cm”
— PR of China “.cn”
— Samoa “.ws”
— Philippines “.ph”
— (the former) Soviet Union “.su”

Story here.

When browsing the web, Internet users should use caution whenever they see a link to any of those country domains, especially for e-commerce sites. Holding the mouse cursor over a link in an email or on a web site will show the URL.

For shortened URLs, a page like LongURL http://longurl.org/ will show the complete URL.

Tom Kelchner