Popular Websites at Risk Malware

As per a study by security firm, Barracuda Lab, popular website are often being targeted to circulate malware on web sites.

Apparently, 58 of the sites listed by the Alexa's most popular 25,000 website are parceled to download exploit, thus potentially affecting a number of people each day.

Studies showed that on an average, at least two top sites of Alexa served malevolent content everyday.

Statistic obtained by researcher clarified all assumptions regarding how malwares were deeply rooted in the sites. In the URL examined, exploits were distributed 23 among 29 days of month, barracuda identifier.

Barracuda could deduce the dearth of the problem as it started its investigation from the very basic. Out of all 58 sites serving malicious contents, 44,160,016 affected the views from 10, 541,371 users. However, the examination did not stop there. Taking into consideration the most widespread exploits and using the statistic from Adobe and Qualys," of 10,541,371 users serving malicious content, 1,642,172 probably were compromised according to Barracuda. However, according to Barracuda, the research that started with Alexa's 25,000 popular websites, more than 1.5 Million were compromised as users often visited well-known website.

Thus, on the basis of the revelation, Barracuda concluded that this problem had been persistent and not erupted all of a sudden.
A similar instance was noticeable when one of the popular website served malware to a number of users during March 2012, through a well-known Dutch news site nu.nl. (Ranked 158 by Alexa) was circulating malware to visitors.

Almost 97% of malware served by the sites were malicious content that were at least 1-year old and over half were more than 5-years old, according to the study, reported darkreading.com on April 3, 2012. This signifies that attackers employ well established, long-lived website for their campaign.

However, none of the malicious domains reported in the discovery are the mainstream. Thus, Google, wiki, reddit, facebook, and so on does not exist. The website which shows most malicious activity include free-tv-online.me,bigresourch.com, myplaycity.com, gaytube.com, filmaffinity.com, and webconfs.com that are responsible for top five malicious domain.

Related article: Popular Firefox Inching Towards Malware’s Target

» SPAMfighter News - 4/14/2012