Blog FAIL - Email FAIL - Web FAIL - Internet FAIL

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 16:28

Business IT - Security

And talking of objectionable content, the Internet is getting dirtier than ever. Indeed, the reports reckons that some 69% of all sites which had been classified as having content flagged as sexual, adult themed, drugs or gambling related were also home to at least one malicious link.

Some 78% of new web pages so uncovered during the first half of the year with this kind of content had at least one malicious link, and 37% of malicious Web attacks included data-stealing code.

In the first half of 2009 alone, Websense Security Labs found that 57% of data-stealing attacks were conducted over the Web.

Email does not escape the general doom and gloom statistics either, with 85.6% of all unwanted emails in circulation during the six month period concerned containing links to spam sites or malicious sites.

In June 2009 alone, the total number of emails detected as containing viruses increased 600 percent over the previous month.
 
Websense Chief Technology Officer Dan Hubbard admits "the last six months have shown that malicious hackers and fraudsters go where the people are on the Web - and have heightened their attacks on popular Web 2.0 sites and continued to compromise established, trusted Web sites in the hope of infecting unsuspecting users. From malicious Twitter spam campaigns and blog comment spam to the massive injection attacks, those perpetrating fraud are exploiting the inherent trust users have of known Web properties and other users."

It's not been a good week for the Internet security, what with the news that one third of businesses fail to encrypt sensitive data during transfer and the SANS report blaming the overwhelming majority of cyber-security risks on just two factors.

To sum it up then: Blog FAIL. Email FAIL. Web FAIL. Internet FAIL.