Most Non-Chargeable Live Streaming Websites Contain Malware

Security researchers after assessing 23,000 freely-available live streaming sites on 5,685 domains unearthed that a good 50% of the advertisements superimposed on videos within the websites contained malware, making visitors prone to fraudulent scams, spurious advertisements, malevolent browser extensions, and simple malicious software.

The study's conductors were researchers from Stony Brook University and the Computer Science Department at Netherlands KU Leuven who elaborated inside the paper that the non-chargeable live streaming utilities were so because of a specific reason, hence the requirement for exploring the utilities' ecosystem.

Now having recognized the streaming websites, researchers employed one semi-automated program for carrying out 850,000 visits followed with assessing one terabyte-and-more of Web-traffic, with a point for charting the streaming environment that comprised website publishers, hosts, aggregators and advertisers.

Subsequently, the researchers examined Web-traffic surfacing due to the visits conducted as well as stated that malicious activity could be seen within 50% of the advertisements that appeared. Softpedia.com posted this, June 17, 2016.

The study revealed that almost 25% of the websites analyzed received their hosting service from servers situated inside Belize. Over 60% of the streaming websites emerged from 5 organizations situated inside Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Belize and Canada.

Further, whilst advertisers were mainly responsible for malware-tainted advertisements, it were the unlawful streaming services that leant increasingly on sinister advertisers for making money out of the services, thus being partially responsible for endangering visitors.

And it's apparent that unlawful freely-available streaming websites too like news publishers are eager for eliminating ad-blockers' function. It has been found that 16% of the one thousand major aggregator domains leveraged utility that impaired ad-blockers.

The researchers are considering making available their website classifier for the common mass, observing that law enforcement could use it for detecting earlier unfamiliar illegal streaming websites.

They further stated that Safari and Google Chrome browsers were more prone to attacks instead of the remaining browsers as well as that within certain instances there were scripts which spotted software for blocking ads which they attempted at bypassing.

The researchers' website classifier will safeguard end-users by unearthing non-chargeable live streaming sports web-pages that are tainted, and reporting the same.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/22/2016