Around 1000 US Websites Serve Malware

As per a study by Web application security company Armorize Technologies Inc, out of the total 200,000 most popular websites, around 1000 belong to the US and serve malware to innocent users.

Majority of these malware infested websites deal in porn, music download and gambling. Besides, 15% of them are legitimate ones, including 7% offer financial services.

Armorize discovered one website "boingboing.com" used as vehicle to deliver malware. The attackers used the website with the hope of accessing broad audience by exploiting the close resemblance of this domain with popular blog "Boingboing.net."

Malware have been hitting computers for the past several years by targeting vulnerabilities in operating system via e-mails containing malicious attachments. But now the Internet has become an integral part of day-to-day life that motivates attackers to target computers by "Drive-by-Download." These "Drive-by-Download" attacks exploit vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash, Web browsers and other Web apps. because people visit these websites quite often. The compromise occurs without the active involvement of the victim. In majority of the cases, the victim doesn't have any idea about the compromise.

Hence, "Drive-by-Downloads" are the first preference of attackers now, said the security firm. Moreover, an unidentified malware could lead to million of "Drive-by-Downloads" on a high traffic website, which cause damage to the brand image and customer relationships.

Caleb Sima, Armorize CEO and Founder of SPI Dynamics, said that Asia seemed to be fiercely going ahead in vulnerability exploitation because the governments in this region pay hugely for intelligence gathering and cyber-warfare, as reported by cnet news on May 26, 2010.

Expressing his view on the findings, Caleb Sima further said that cyber crook used various methods to corrupt websites with malware like - cross-site scripting and SQL injection. These attacks became tougher to detect owing to the high sophistication level, as reported by SearchFinancialSecurity on May 25, 2010.

The malware injected only through certain web browser versions and in regions. Google blacklisted these legitimate websites.

Thus, the security experts state that the organizations wish to protect their brand images, customer relationships and bottom lines should find methods to save their web applications against malware infections and customers from "Drive-by-Downloads."

Related article: Around 30% Blogs Found to be Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 6/7/2010