Report Claims Hacked Sites Outnumber Maliciously-crafted Sites

As per a report released by San Diego-based security firm Websense on January 22, 2007, it is discovered that the number of genuine sites hacked and embedded with code to harm users' computers with malware has now surpassed the number of sites specially made by cyber crooks.

As per the report, there were almost 51% of the total harmful sites that Websense discovered in the second half of 2007 and they found them to be authentic sites attacked by hackers. Surprisingly, malevolent compromised sites are more dangerous as they already have an existing group of trusted users and visitors. Unfortunately, a lot of these visitors and users did not have the recent patches for their Web browser.

Vice President of Websense security research, Dan Hubbard, said that there are almost 2 Million dangerous websites online and around half of these have been already attacked that varies from household brand names to mom-and-pop stores, reported Washingtonpost on January 22, 2008.

Dan also added that hackers are laying special emphasis on elevating their methods of attack and setting up strong infrastructures as was apparent in Storm Worm attacks last year, reported idm.net.au on January 23, 2008.

Dan also claimed that hackers will continue with the sophistication of their work and apply user generated material and Web 2.0 applications resulting in even bigger security issues for companies, reported idm.net.au on January 23, 2008.

The report by Websense also pointed out that in the second half of 2007, Web 2.0 attacks saw a tremendous rise due to hacked social networking websites, viz. Facebook and MySpace, and targeted Trojans. This is followed by a usual trend by nasty visitors who tries out to access authentic websites to deceive the users towards fake sites so that they can affect their PC or hack private information.

Sophos also released a same kind of report revealing that there are almost 6,000 infected sites every day, and one in every 14 seconds. Out of this, more than 83% are innocent users and enterprises who have no knowledge that their site has been hacked. One of the major findings of the report by Sophos is the extent to which some countries have been infected.

Related article: Reports Says That IM Malware Attacks are on a Rise

» SPAMfighter News - 1/30/2008