Google Holds Twice as Much Malware as Twitter, Yahoo! And Bing Combined

The security firm, Barracuda Networks Inc. released its Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security Report on July 28, 2010. The report disclosed that when the research was conducted on popular trending topics, Google acquired first rank in terms of malware distribution with more than twice the volume of malware as Twitter, Bing and Yahoo holds collectively.

Barracuda Labs carried out a research on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter for around two months. The study evaluated an approximate of 5.5 Million search results and about 25,000 trending topics.

According to the report, Google presents at 69% of malware; Yahoo! at 18%; Bing at 12%; and Twitter at 1%. More than half of the malware was found between 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.

In addition, the top ten key words used by malware distributors comprise the name of three actresses, a Playboy Playmate, a NFL player and a college student who forged his way into Harvard University.

Barracuda Labs also states that the average amount of time taken by a trending topic to appear on Google after breaking on Twitter, for instance, is just 1.2 days. Proving that the hackers don't waste time when it comes to getting those malicious inks into play.

Meanwhile, Barracuda published a separate report on Twitter on July 28, 2010, which tried to recognize the malware indicators in the usage of Twitter account, disclosed that the account usage of Twitter increased. More and more people were tweeting on the Internet. Interestingly, even the casual users of this social networking website were now tweeting more frequently and spent more time online. With the increased number of online users, malicious activities also increased.

Moreover, the Twitter Crime Rate for H1-2010 was 1.67%. Twitter Crime Rate can be defined as the percentage of accounts created per month that were ultimately blocked for suspicious or malicious activities or else misused.

Dr. Paul Judge, Chief Research Officer and VP at Barracuda Networks, said that their study showed that attackers had serious efforts dedicated towards becoming noticeable to Billions of netizens that were using search engines everyday along with those who were connected on the social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook etc., as reported by the ZDNet on July 28, 2010.

Related article: Google Rectifies Gmail flaw in Three Days

» SPAMfighter News - 8/10/2010