Web-Related Malware Contaminations Increasing Fast, Says Dasient

Dasient, the web security company, in its upcoming statistics dominated report indicates that the total number of malware hosting websites whether intentional or accidental is increasing fast.

Says the company, over 640,000 websites along with about 5.8 Million webpages have some sort of malware. Incidentally, Dasient is an establishment of former Googlers providing services to Internet sites towards helping them remaining malware free as well as off blacklists.

Meanwhile, the company's estimation of contaminated webpages is almost two times that of Microsoft's estimate in its report released in April 2009. Also, the number of contaminated websites that Google blacklisted has been over two times more during 2008, registering a huge number of 40,000 fresh websites in seven days.

Further, Dasient detected over 52,000 Web-related malware contaminations that resulted in over 72,000 distinct infections that the company logged from the time it started a malware analysis program at the beginning of 2009.

Stated Ameet Ranadive, co-founder of Dasient, the con artists were using attacking servers through which they were distributing their malicious programs to massive numbers of customers. The Register reported the news on October 27, 2009.

Ranadive added that many of the said infections were complicated as also frequently highly obfuscated, making it hard for even long-time practicing webmasters to determine the infected portions of their websites and subsequently to repair them.

Furthermore, Dasient stated that in a day, about 7,000 websites became infected, while it also saw a 39.6% rate of website reinfection even after thorough clean up. According to the company, attackers employ malicious advertisements or automated scripts as some of the means to constantly attempt at planting malware on websites for carrying out criminal campaigns.

Moreover, along with website contamination research, Dasient states it's providing "malware strings" containing certain exploit that would enable IT managers to determine possible infections on their sites.

Besides, around mid-October 2009, ScanSafe, another firm that provides Web security, reported that 2,000 or more sites were compromised in the so-called Gumblar attack that involved mass website contamination. A ScanSafe security investigator stated that during the attack a lot of those websites probably got infected in initial waves and then got reinfected.

Related article: Web Browsers Too Have Security Exploits

» SPAMfighter News - 11/9/2009