One in every 1,000 pages of the World Wide Web is malicious and the
rate of infection is rising, according to a security probe by Google.
By using its crawling software to identify threats, the company found
that 3.3million unique URLs on over 180,000 websites automatically
install malware.
But contrary to popular belief, the probe found that the reputable
parts of the Web, including IT and Business zones, aren’t necessarily
safer than its red-light districts.
Google reflected: "Merely avoiding the dark corners of the Internet does not limit exposure".
In its study, the company found the total number of malicious downloads
on x-rated pages was much lower than in other page categories, like
Computing, Regional, Business and Entertainment.
“Therefore even if someone was to avoid adult web pages…, [they] would
still be exposed to risk,” said Niels Provos, of Google’s anti-malware
team, and author of the research.
“Ordinary web pages are also contributors to web exploitation… this can
be explained by the mechanisms being used to distribute web malware.”
But his analysis shows adult-orientated page browsers “may increase”
their risk of exploitation: “Among the set of landing pages detected in
the random set of URLs , we found that approximately 0.24% were adult
web pages whereas the other categories were as low as 0.018%.”
Elsewhere in the research, over 38% of both Apache and PHP versions
were outdated, thereby “increasing the risk of remote content
injection” to these severs.
The analysis also shows that on average 2% of malicious web sites were delivering malware via advertising.
Google said the underlying problem is that advertising space is often
syndicated to other parties who are not known to the web site owner.
Perhaps even more worrying is the finding that approximately 1.3% of
the incoming queries to Google Web search now return at least one URL
labelled as malicious in the results page.
“This trend seems to be increasing,” Provos said in an overview of his
team’s study, which found China to be the biggest malware distributor.
Google found that even state-of-the-art anti-virus engines are lacking in their ability to protect against drive-by downloads.
"While this is to be expected, it does call for
more elaborate defense mechanisms to curtail this rapidly increasing threat."
Provos concluded: “We hope…this will help us to better understand the
malware problem in the future ad allow us to protect users all over the
internet from malicious web sites as best as we can. One thing is clear
- we have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Feb 21, 2008
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