Chinese takeaway Google Safe Browsing badware title

Davey Winder
Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:58

Your IT - Home IT

According to the latest reports, when it comes to 'badware' the Chinese are really, really bad. Pulling information from the Google Safe Browsing project, it seems over half the websites hosting malware on the planet are in China.

The StopBadware Infected Sites Report for May 2008 which has just been published, has China hosting a whopping 52 percent of identified badware sites. To put that in some perspective, the United States in second place only hosts 21 percent.

To put it in even greater perspective, no other country on the planet hosts more than 4 percent of the world's malware sites. China, quite simply, takes away the title of the most malware prolific country when it comes to distribution hosts are concerned.

Interestingly, a total of 106 countries hosted at least one infected site according to the report, and 38 of them hosted at least one hundred. This based on the Google Safe Browsing data, from which StopBadware analysed 200,000 websites known to host what they call badware.

The StopBadware organisation has a Badware Website Clearinghouse with an updated copy of
the list of active badware websites generated by Google’s Safe Browsing initiative. The total sites in this as of May 2008 came to 213,575.

StopBadware.org resolved every URL to an IP address, and then identified the autonomous system (AS) block name, autonomous system block number (ASN) and the network’s registered country of origin from these.

8,556 URLs did not resolve to a valid IP address and so were treated as unknown by StopBadware. The 252 sites which returned no data for AS block, and 2332 sites which did likewise with regards to country code were also treated as unknown.

Going one step further, StopBadware also analysed the top seven countries by number of infections to arrive at a figure which shows the relationship between a country’s Internet-using population and its number of badware sites.

Using CIA Fact Book data to determine Internet using populations, the badware sites per million Internet users figure could be arrived at as follows:

1. China 689
2. Russia 307
3. United States 212
4. Germany 135
5. France 128
6. Republic of Korea 115
7. Great Britain 60

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