Hong Kong has been declared the world's most dangerous place to visit - on the internet, at least.

Websites which end with .hk - the country code for Hong Kong - have the greatest number of vulnerabilities out of any of so-called top level domains, according to a report by the online security company McAfee.

One site in five with the .hk suffix posed a security threat, the report found, followed by China (.cn), where 11 per cent of sites were compromised. The safest country codes were those of Finland and Japan.

Experts said that Hong Kong had been singled out because of the lower cost of registering domain names there, and because criminals were able to register multiple domains at once, meaning that they could write and implement malicious codes much more rapidly.

Of the so-called 'generic' top level domains, such as .com and .net, .info was the most dangerous, with 12 per cent of such names posing a threat. The .com suffix was relatively safe, in ninth place, while .gov was the domain least targeted by cyber-criminals.

According to McAfee, the most common threats included compromised sites trying to install a malicious program on a visitor's machine, and phishing scams, where visitors were lured into a thinking a site was something else - a banking portal, for instance - and enticed to hand over details.

Greg Day, a security analyst at McAfee, said that typically criminals did not aim threats at specific countries, but in some cases internet use directed the type of threat that would become prevalent. In Brazil, for instance, where internet banking is extremely popular, the incidence of phishing attacks was higher, he said.

McAfee analysed 9.9 million websites across 265 country and generic domains.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming