Blog FAIL - Email FAIL - Web FAIL - Internet FAIL

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 16:28

Business IT - Security

Ever wondered just what state the Internet is in? A new report reveals the truth, and it sure ain't pretty.

Every six months, Websense publishes a State of the Internet report which does the usual security vendor thing of analysing the threats that it has seen spreading online and trying to make some kind of sense of it all. The latest such report has just been released and the key findings are more depressing than an extended remix of a Morrissey song.

It is actually quite hard to know where to start when it comes to unraveling the bad news contained within this report but I guess that the 671% increase in malicious web sites is probably as good a place as any.

According to Websense Security Labs there was 233% growth as far as the number of malicious sites over the last six months was concerned, and 671% growth across the year.

Most worrying, 77% of those sites containing malicious code that were spotted during the first six months of this year are totally legitimate ones that have fallen foul of some compromise or other.

Think of widespread attacks such as Beladen, Gumblar and Nine Ball that existed to compromise trusted sites with massive injection campaigns and it becomes pretty obvious why the high percentage rates for malicious sites was maintained over this six month period.

Blogs also failed miserably to impress, with 95% of the user generated comment to blogs, chat rooms and online forums being either spam or linking to malicious content.

Unfortunately, concerted efforts using community-driven tools which can be seen at the likes of BlogSpot and YouTube have proved largely ineffective in combating the threat.

Websense reports that such tools only manage to prevent between 25% and 35% of the spam or malicious content that is posted.

But wait, it gets worse. Find out how much so on page 2...

CONTINUES