Davey Winder
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 17:28
Business IT -
Security
Page 1 of 2
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...
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