Those of you considering helping worried about the risk have less to worry about – although in life nothing is 100% certain.
As I suggested a couple days ago, the routine to evaluate the risk profile of any arbitrary URL is starting to be integrated into the directory. The approach is the conservative “Don’t allow it unless specifically permitted”. Unknown is unsafe (which is not the same as dangerous, which is known to be a risk)
A very large portion of radio station web sites are hosted in a dozen or so web hosting facilities, and I’ve made the judgment that those servers have a “safe” profile. That doesn’t mean there is 0% chance of a problem – there may have been an infection of the server, but with a professionally managed server in a large facility, the chance of that surviving very long is small. Just because a radio station is hosting its own web site doesn’t mean it is safe – in fact, most of the infected sites I’ve found have been station run on their own servers.
If the server is in a range that has never been seen before, then ** caution ** is urged. Over time, as more and more server farms are approved, the ** caution ** rate will go down.
If the server is outside North America, it should automatically be flagged as requiring ** caution **. Canada is kind of in the middle – the server is outside of US jurisdiction but probably “safe” due to close cooperation by law enforcement and the general good judgment of Canadians. Canada is not Estonia or Indonesia.
The second entry – while the IP address is “unknown”, looking up the IP address told me that server is who it says it is (Reverse DNS) and you see the “Match” in green. Hijacked domains servers won’t do that, but neither will most legitimate web servers. Match is good, no “match” doesn’t mean a thing.