Avast WEBforum
Other => General Topics => Topic started by: drhayden1 on May 16, 2007, 09:49:52 AM
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Google released a study last week (pdf alert) suggesting that 1 in 10 web pages could contain viruses that can be forcefully downloaded to your computer. The report says that an average of 8,000 new web sites with malware were developed each week during the month of April.
The take home point here is that we're not just talking about shady websites that you wouldn't trust with your credit card information. More and more often, legitimate websites are being infected with malicious code by hackers. Simply visiting these sites could be enough to allow an attacker to find and exploit vulnerabilities in your system.
Interestingly, the report serves to scare the pants off of its readers by saying "average gumputer users have no means to protect themselves from this threat. Their browser can be compromised just by visiting a web page and become the vehicle for installing multitudes of malware" while they are unaware.
Of course, the simplest thing you can do to protect yourself is turn off JavaScript in your browser, but that could also mean missing out on many rich media features on the web. So the next best thing is to get yourself some good anti-virus/anti-spyware software and run a complete scan every day. You might want to check out AVG Anti-Virus Free and Windows Defender for starters.
http://news.com.com/Google+10+percent+of+sites+are+dangerous/2100-7349_3-6183818.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news
+++this isn't double threading-is it polonus ???
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=28380.0
click on pic to super-size ::)
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Hi drhayden1,
But Google itself was also used as a malware vector using Google Ads on the Google Searchresultspage to infect searchers. This time people that looked to "BBB", "BBBonline", "Cars.com" have found malicious sponsor ads, that use an IE stealth drive-by download to a hidden link in a mouse-over Google ad feature. Google has removed these malware ridden ads.
polonus
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thanks for the info damian ;)
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Google has removed*** these malware ridden ads.
*** Google has removed most of the offending ads. :'(
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Hi bob3160,
Mine was just a picture of a clickable link that some-one put out on his blog, so he could establish how many would click this link deliberately, and would get themselves infested if his threat had been a real one. Bob, you would not like to know how many thousands of people would like to shoot themselves in the foot clicking on something obvious like this (16.000 dumbo's did this).
polonus
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Apparently it's not 10% but 0.1%:
Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%.
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/05/introducing-googles-anti-malware.html (http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2007/05/introducing-googles-anti-malware.html)
::)
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That is more like it, I thought ten percent was somewhat on the large side, 10% of the internet is absolutely huge and it would be almost impossible not to bump into an infected site. So one tenth of one percent although still a formidable number is considerably better than ten percent.
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Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised
0.1% is still a large sum(wonder how you could figure how much that would be) ??? ::)
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Since every 1000th web site is infected, sum up the number of sites that you browse daily and calculate exactly when you'll stumble over an infected site to avoid it (pun intended) lol.
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sum up the number of sites that you browse daily and calculate exactly when you'll stumble over an infected site to avoid it
lets see...how many do i browse(i've only spent Total time logged in: 14 days, 17 hours and 49 minutes-current on this forum in a little over a year being a member)and my computer tech sites and my funny sites and my interesting sites and my other sites....i really don't know-thanks a-lot-is there a device on this computer that can calculate that for me ::) ???
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Calling Steven Hawking, need some help here...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking
very very smart man..can he help us-email address or phone number would help :D
click on pic to enlarge ::)
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I feel for this you need to go for the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners-Lee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners-Lee) ;D
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He is now living in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA) with his wife and two children.
i'll give him a call or email and see if he can help ;D ;D
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A down and dirty google search for www. returns 7,700,000,000 hits, yes there might be the odd one or three million duplicates ;D
I would say billions of web pages as in the above SWAG (Scientific Wild Assed Guess) would be reasonable but how many pages in a web site, that's anybodies guess ;D
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I don't think the knowledge can't help us here, I think we need a help from beyond....
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i guess i will never know ??? ::)