Hong Kong is the shadiest neighborhood on the Net

Everyone knows which neighborhoods in their city are the ones to avoid, but figuring out where not to go on the Web is a much murkier proposition. There are plenty of specific sites that users should steer clear of, and now McAfee has come up with a list of domains that are the most dangerous for Internet users. Topping the charts is Hong Kong’s .hk domain, in which 19.2% of all Web pages poses some sort of security threat to visitors. Moving up fast is China (.cn), with 11% malicious sites. Not to be outdone, the .info domain has its share of bad stuff too, with 11.8%. The stats come from McAfee’s survey of several dozen TLDs, using its SiteAdvisor rating tool.

So which countries are cleaning up their acts? Fan favorites Tokelau (.tk) and Samoa (.ws) dropped well down the list of malicious domains, to 28 and 12, respectively. I’ll offer a real, but completely mediocre, prize to the first commenter who can tell me where Tokelau is, without using Google. You’re on the honor system here.