Most of world’s ‘bad’ websites hosted in US: AVG

Gordon Peters
Thursday, 11 March 2010 14:14

IT Industry - Market

AVG says the myth that malicious code is primarily hosted in countries where e-crime laws are less developed has been shattered by its latest research which reveals that more than 40 percent of the world’s ‘bad’ websites are hosted in the United States.

According to AVG, contrary to popular opinion, most malicious websites are hosted on US servers and not in other countries like China, with that country and Germany the second and third countries on the malicious website table, but both with just a mere five percent of the world’s corrupted servers spreading malicious code.

AVG says its research is based on the analysis of threats reported during the last six months from its 110 million worldwide users of its AVG LinkScanner web security product, and that study indicates an increase in malware-serving web sites targeting end users, “which typically focus on stealing online banking credentials, credit card information, personal identities and passwords to social sites.”

Karel Obluk, chief technology officer at AVG, said the detection and analysis of exploits was based on AVG’s “unique crowd-sourced methods” for analysing web content for malicious or dangerous intent as reported by AVG’s network of LinkScanner installations worldwide.

According to Obluk, malicious code is not just an issue with outlaw servers located in countries with weak laws and lax enforcement. “Monitoring active web servers serving exploits around the world indicates that 44 percent of the corrupted servers are hosted in the United States, followed by Germany and China at just 5 percent each. Many of these malware-serving web sites are legitimate sites compromised by hackers to serve exploits on their behalf. In total, exploitive servers were found in nearly 4,600 locations throughout the USA.”

“The results of this study shatter the myth that malicious code is primarily hosted in countries where e-crime laws are less developed.

“Our research shows that malicious content is much more likely to show up on web servers in the U.S. than one in Asia or Eastern Europe. This makes perfect sense since the USA is a primary target market for the criminals and has rich and mature Internet infrastructure making the threats both highly accessible and cheap to host. What is most striking is the clear rise in the number of malicious servers in the last six months. Today’s hacking techniques are highly evasive so the average user cannot tell if a website is serving malware or not. A web security product is needed.”

“Even more important to note is that, on average during this six month period, about 50 percent of the domains hosted on these servers were online and hosting threats only one day or less. This transient nature makes them very hard to find and add to traditional reputation-based protection systems in time to be helpful to users.”

According to AVG Australia and New Zealand marketing manager, Lloyd Borrett, as a preventative measure, “users should look for web security protection when going online,” and he adds, "today's bad guys are smarter and create threats that are more sophisticated, hiding in legitimate web sites that are sometimes poisoned for less than a day. This makes a real-time solution like AVG LinkScanner absolutely critical to protect against web based threats."