Jeff Green, Senior VP of Product Development & Avert Labs said, “Just like the real world, the virtual threats and risks are constantly changing. As our research shows, websites that are safe today can be dangerous tomorrow. Surfing the web-based or conventional wisdom is not enough to avoid risk online,”

China (“.cn”) positioned second this year over 11 percent. The most risky generic domain from 2007’s report became more dangerous with 11.8 percent of all sites ending in (“.info”) posing a security threat and is the third most dangerous domain overall. The most popular domain, (“.com”), is the ninth riskiest overall.

In the reverse Finland (“.fi”) replaced Ireland (“.is”) as the safest online target with 0.05 percent, followed by Japan (“.jp”), while government websites (“.gov”) remained the safest generic domain.

The study compared the ratings of sites found in each of the 265 countries and generic domains and ranked them by the number of risky websites found in each domain that contained adware, spyware, viruses, spam, excessive pop-ups, browser exploits or links to other red-rated sites.