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Quote: Russia and Romania remain the worst offenders in terms of hosting websites containing dangerous software such as viruses, spyware and "phishing" code – but Pacific island nations are not far behind, says a big security software vendor, McAfee.

One of the Californian company's subsidiaries, SiteAdvisor, which specialises in assessing the risk associated with top level domains – such as.nz or.tk (Tokelau),.ws (Samoa),.tv (Tuvalu) and.nu (Niue) – found 4.1 per cent of all internet sites pose some sort of risk to a visitor.

Quote: Mark Maxwell, senior product manager at McAfee told the internetnews.com website there was a direct correlation between the risk posed by a country domain, or other top-level domain such as.org, and the standards which an individual had to meet to register a domain.

Countries such as Australia, Canada and Finland required verification that an person or business was registering a site for registering domains as well, he said.

Quote:It quoted a senior New Zealand diplomat as saying both Tokelau and Niue had lost control of their internet domains and, along with New Zealand, risked losing their international reputations.