Compromised Sites on a Continuous Rise, Says Google

As per the statistics from the search giant Google, it is discovering continuously surging number of malicious URLs that could potentially infect users' PCs.

The report prepared by Niels Provos, member of Google's Security Team, states that in the past few months, the number of malware websites detected has been continuously rising, reported Security Watch on August 27, 2009.

Google has been filtering approx 150,000 badware websites monthly as of June 2008. But the figure is estimated somewhere around 350,000 in August 2009, stated Provos in Google's security blog.

Users of Chrome browser as well as the search tools of Google alongwith the users of Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox receive warnings while visiting websites which have been identified risky by the API in the past.

Google has also listed the top ten malicious sites. All of the domains have allegedly compromised in excess of 10,000 websites on the Internet.

In addition to this, security experts at Google have also observed that the recent surge in the volume of compromised URLs is astounding. They claimed that modern attack tactics have led to this increasing trend.

Provos revealed that there has been a huge surge in the volume of infected sites since April 2009, as a result of which the entries on Google's malware list has become more than double in past one year. There had been periods when 40,000 websites were infected per week, he noted.

Another interesting thing noticed by the company is that in comparison of earlier increases in infections related with large scale attacks, like Martuz and Gumblar, most of the freshly infected URLs direct to hundreds of distinct domains, because cyber crooks are continuously diversifying their attempts, reported the security staffer of Google.

In January 2008, 1.2% of total Google search queries comprised of atleast one result of such sort. The trend has mainly been downward in the meantime, although some fluctuations can be observed. An increase was noticed in May 2009, which might be because of the emergence of an increased number of infected websites.

Finally, Google stated that keeping up with the evolving malware trend, they are constantly making improvements in their systems, which is evident from the higher number of compromised sites recently detected by them.

Related article: Compromise of Personal Information of UI Employees

» SPAMfighter News - 9/9/2009