Pacific Island Top Level Domains: Home to Spammers and Scammers

[jezebel]

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.

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.

article http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/3995345a28.html

[regic]

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.

I'm surprised to see .nz in that list. We offer both .nz and .tv registrations  :-\