Infection Rate on Authentic Websites Beat Adult Websites

In its latest study, Czech Republic-based anti-virus vendor, Avast!, found that for each malware-infected adult domain discovered, there were 99 legitimate websites which were also infected by malware. The company underlined that a falling infection rate on adult websites came out as an obvious trend during its study.

For instance, in the UK, there are higher number of infected websites that contain the word "London" than any website including the word "sex".

Avast CTO Ondrej Vlcek commented on this newly emerging trend which was justified with examples and statistics and said that they don't mean to encourage netizens to begin surfing the Internet for erotic content, reported theregister.co.uk on June 30, 2010.

Apart from this, the discovery of a malware-infected webpage on the website of Vodafone UK, whose presence was confirmed as of June 28, 2010, explains how much advanced cybercriminals have become in their approach to spread malware using genuine websites.

The security firm noted that the Vodafone's website contained a malicious redirecting JavaScript. Such kind of infection is very common and is responsible for 20% of all infected webpages in the UK.

Vlcek added that the issue is especially grim owing to the fact that CVE-2010-1885 vulnerability targets that particular version of Windows which is most widely used, and the vulnerability still remains un-patched. This indicates that a user is vulnerable despite running a totally updated Windows XP SP3 having all the security updates, as per the statement published by net-security.org on June 30, 2010.

In its report, Avast! has also included Brazilian software download website Baixaki and several Germany-based small business websites.

To conclude, the security firm said that one can't be fully sure of the safety of a website since some sort of danger is always associated with the websites. So, it is very important for users to adopt safe surfing tips - they should regularly update anti-virus software as well as other security solutions and should also use their common sense to avoid downloading or installing anything whose genuineness is not 100% assured.

Related article: Infection in Chinese Security Website

» SPAMfighter News - 7/10/2010