Facebook most blacklisted site, says open DNS

Social media websites remain top when it comes to blacklisting websites according to Open DNS’s annual report. The web security and filtering company has produced a report detailing some of the key findings of 2010.

The most blocked website was Facebook blocked by 14 percent of companies using blacklisting, it was close ahead of My Space with 10 percent and YouTube with 8 percent. Interestingly, Twitter, 2010’s trendsetter was chosen only by 2 percent of organisations. However, as a demonstration of the nature of the web, where one company’s time-waster is another company’s marketing outlet, the three leading whitelisted (eg sites that have been specifically been cleared for access) were YouTube, Facebook and Gmail.

There were no surprises when it came to categories being blocked: pornography was by far the winner (or should that be loser?) here – of the companies using content filtering to block out subjects, 85 percent of them named pornography, 80 percent said sexuality and 77 percent of sites were blocked for being tasteless.

According to Open DNS, there was one clear winner when it comes to phishing: the most spoofed website was PayPal, 46 percent of identified phishing sites were spoofing the payment site – that was well ahead of the second most targeted site, Facebook with 5 percent. And there was an overwhelming winner when it came to the hosting country too: 53 percent of identified phishing sites were hosted in the US.