Many people are pretty uninformed or simply just don't really care about the dangers that await us all while surfing the internet even when avoiding the usual trojan and malware culprits like pornography sites and pages along with many advertisements and banner ads.I have all my computers protected up the ying yang with the usual full compliment of watchware (what I call it), McAffee virus on two, Symantec on a Mac, Adaware, Spybot, Spyware blaster and Previx, with ZoneAlarm and I pick up stuff all the time with these programs as do most when you use them regularly. And I'm not surfing the porno sites either, this is just bopping between blogs and news sites day in and day out in my daily blogging and graphic /web design work and travels.
The magnitude of this problem is pretty startling and growing exponentially as Google is starting to examine the entire web to identify these malicious websites, quite a daunting task no doubt. I'm sure you've probably run across pages that Google identifies contained within searches that are malicious, and when they get done with their current project there will be alot more of them.
Google searches web's dark side:
BBC NEWS Technology "One in 10 web pages scrutinized by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user's PC.
Researchers from the firm surveyed billions of sites, subjecting 4.5 million pages to 'in-depth analysis'.
About 450,000 were capable of launching so-called 'drive-by downloads', sites that install malicious code, such as spyware, without a user's knowledge"A further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise a user's computer, the team report.
To address the problem, the researchers say the company has "started an effort to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious".
Phantom sites
Drive-by downloads are an increasingly common way to infect a computer or steal sensitive information.
They usually consist of malicious programs that automatically install when a potential victim visits a booby-trapped website.
"To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering," wrote Google researcher Niels Provos and his colleagues in a paper titled The Ghost In The Browser. The user is presented with links that promise access to 'interesting' pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos."
The vast majority exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install themselves. read more
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