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Regular Domains Have More Malware Than Porn Sites
SnugglesTheBear writes "New research pours scorn on the comforting but erroneous belief that Windows surfers who avoid smut and wares on the Web are likely to avoid exposure to malware. A study by free anti-virus firm Avast found 99 infected legitimate domains for every infected adult website. In the UK, Avast found that more infected domains contained the word 'London' than the word 'sex.' Among the domains labeled as infected by Avast was the smartphones section of the Vodafone UK website. The mobile phone operator's site contained a malicious JavaScript redirect script that attempted to take advantage of an unpatched Windows Help and Support Centre flaw (CVE-2010-1885) to infect the machines of visiting surfers."
"London", as a keyword, is a heavy spam target. I used to use "London Hotels" as a test case for SiteTruth's web spam detector. Google used to do badly on that search. (Since they started handling travel destinations as a special case, the first 10 Google results are now either paid ads or results from the business search engine.)
How many of those redirects lead to adult sites? A very large number I'd imagine.
Further actual numbers mean little - what percentage of porn sites are infected (or deliberately take malware related action) as opposed to legitimate sites?
there's competition in the porn world... they want to make money.
vodafone, like most carriers, will be making money no matter what.... thanks to monopolies, duopolies, market segmentation and such.
this creates a lazy attitude towards security, among other things.
is anyone surprised by this, really?
THL phish sticks
In the UK, Avast found that more infected domains contained the word 'London' than the word 'sex.'
Maybe it's due to my weird fetishes, but none of the porn sites I visit actually contain the word "sex".
It's all fine and good to point out that for every porn site there are 99 non-porn sites that have malware.
But what are the percentages of said catagories infected?
What percentage of porn sites have malware?
What percentage of non-porn sites have malware?
If the percentages are high enough for a category, it is a good idea to avoid that category, even if it is a tiny percentage of total sites.
Does that still hold true in terms of traffic? It doesn't matter how many sites have malware, it matters how often those sites are visited. One high volume site with malware does more damage than a thousand sites that no one visits.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
"A study by free anti-virus firm Avast found 99 infected legitimate domains for every infected adult web site."
Maybe there are just 99 regular websites to every porn site out there.
Vodafone UK infected... well, it WOULD be embarrassing if it was about any other company, but with all the bad things I've heard about Vodafone you probably get better quality service and stabler applications even via the infection than from Vodafone.
People in the porn business are in it to make money. For the most part, they work together. Ever notice how they all link/ad/popup to more sites all within their clique?
There's more money in repeat subscriptions than regular joe getting infected with Malware.
I would imagine that part of the reason for this is that the idea that so many adult sites are infected drives adult sites to be very careful, so they don't get infected. If it gets out that an adult site is infected, there are plenty of others out there for people to go to, adult sites simply can't afford to become infected.
A "study" done by an anit-virus firm finds that there are a lot of infected web sites out there. Regardless of the validity of the study, it seems that there is a HUGE conflict of interest here. A company in the business of protecting users for malicous websites publishes a study showing that there are a lot of malicous websites out there.
Uptime.
Penetration testing.
Viral infections.
Discuss amongst yourselves...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I tend to stay on porn sites, it's much safer there.
To validate this study...
Which sites did they "study"?
This isn't surprising. In a way advertisers and malware authors have a lot in common. They both want to have their ware's in places with the highest visibility, and they both want you to get something you may not want or need... As much as we all love to joke about how much porn there is on the internet I think we all realize there's more to it than just that.
"Regular" Domains..."Porn Sites"...
There are more people NOT named CmdrTaco than those who ARE. Yes, the total number is higher, but what about the percentage???
Get rid of those affiliate marketing schemes and the financial incentive for click-jacking, etc., goes way down.
Malware author: "If I can get credit for sending traffic to your site, then what's to stop me from infecting as many sites as I can and making money off it?"
Want malware to drop? Boycott anyone who uses affiliate marketing.
what kind of infection are we talking about?
an adobe flash attack vector?
or hepatitis b?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So do porn sysadmins!
Like I needed a reason to visit porn sites...
Hope is the currency of fools
Java in general is a security nightmare. Adobe had a huge hole in it because of the javascript that runs. Mysql has database injection holes because of the javascript that runs. This is part of the reason why adobe now has the option to turn off the javascript from running in Adobe Reader. Also why so many sites are getting away from being java based. They are trying to eliminate the security problems.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
I lived in a centrally located but rather crummy neighborhood of NYC back in the early '80s. Late at night cars would be backed up up several blocks waiting in a line so they could turn down my street and pick up a hooker.
Funny thing is, the neighborhood seemed perfectly safe. I never had any trouble getting to or from my apartment at any hour of the day or night. I figured it was probably one of the safest areas of NYC because any crime would have been bad for business.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I didn't RTFA.
BUT, the title seems misleading, given what the summary says.
"Regular Domains Have More Malware"
from the summary:
"Avast found 99 infected legitimate domains for every infected adult website. In the UK"
This doesn't mean that regular domain have more malware. It simply means that there's more regular domains with malware, which shouldn't surprise anyone, since there are more regular domains period.
when swingers are more likely to have an STD than a prostitute and a regular domain has more malware than a porn site.
Obviously, the sex-professionals, be it high tech or human beings, are far more careful than an amateur.
Porn sites have a built-in defense mechanism. It's hard to hack when your hands are busy.
If you want to rob people, you go to the busiest places.
So really if you use a search engine, and search for the most popular things then you may as well assume you are going to find something.
you want to view porn and not get bugs, run a different OS in a virtual machine, turn of javascipt in the browser and don't install flash. Or use a PS3!
The porn site people are smart and dont want to load your computer with malware and get blocked in firefox as an attack site. They want to be discrete and keep you coming back. Its the hackers that who dont care who's site they ruin by sneaking in hidden iframes and fake anti virus scanners.
Yea, but that's sort of like saying "Hookers take more Penicillin than Doctors do".
Do you really think only 1% of the internet is porn?
Researchers at Texas A&M are crawling the web and finding such statistics such as these. I do believe they have found that around 20% of websites on the internet are porn sites.
Would you hug a bear?
Don't use the web if you use a Microsoft OS and browser.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
he is tired of life...
Nullius in verba
Am I the only one who isn't surprised? I would expect porn sites to be less infected than regular sites.
Admins and designers who work on such sites are more likely, than those that work in more "innocent" areas, to be exposed to the lower end of human behaviour through using spammers and ropey affiliate schemes to draw in traffic. If you are aware of what nefarious things you do (or could do) and more importantly what your competition do or could do then you are going to be more clued up on how careful you need to be with site security.
Ignoring the lower end of human behaviour (there must be at least one or two porn sites out amongst the millions that don't spam/crack/what-ever to make an extra few $), to be successful financially a porn site need to be secure, otherwise people would just hack in and take the content for nothing. It is simply good business for them to be security concious, especially the smaller outfits/franchises that are run by a small team (where the designers/programmers/admins are more likely to be directly affected in the wage-slip if the site is hacked). Designers, programmers and admins working on a small and possible not very sensitive part or a much larger organisations output (like the vodafone example mentioned) may not be as directly aware of such issues. The "smartphones section" of their site, assuming this is a phone/contract sales area, is not likely to have cracking types trying to steal content. Now a site (or part there of) that is offering paid-for downloadable content I would expect to be "safer" than other areas for the same reason as a porn site: the content needs to be protected more than the content of a brochure page.
Is it possible that Avast could be finding false positives in the scans that the are running? I know it's quite possible on scanning of my local files and what not, but I'm not too familiar with the scanning of websites.
Enough said.
Are you truly prepared to traverse the deepest darkest corners of the internet? Where unspeakable things happen and are best left untouched? Where your very soul is at risk and your sanity might be stripped from you with one wrong click?
Do you really got what it takes to fire up your browser and go to a mobile phone operator site?
I think not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Which category did they place www.sexlondon.co.uk in?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I agree, they have a business model.
Secondly, porn sites tend to be, you know, *maintained*. Software is updated, patched, so the website works.
Define: Legitimate site? (everything NOT porn?)
I highly doubt this study. From personal experience, ANY shady website (whether porn or not) is MUCH more likely to contain viruses. Heck, the only time I was infected in my life was on a porn site browsing with Firefox with Avast enabled - I think the shady sites have a decent incentive to create awesome mal-ware as they don't have a real business model. Granted, some porn-sites make plenty money without mal-ware and I'm sure those are just as unlikely to contain a virus as slashdot.org or google.com. It's not the porn that makes the site risky - but I will say porn-sites are more likely to be "shady".
...by avoiding non-porn sites altogether!
Wouldn't a more accurate comparison have looked at the ratio of infected porn sites to total number of porn sites compared to the number of infected regular sites to the total number of regular infected sits?
.. Do you have any idea how hard it is to digest such pictures? :)
Insert
I think the real story here is two fold;
The first is [obvious]:
More pages with Malware contained 'London' because of those Geo-Spam ads that usually come from Virus-laden ad networks. "Hot Singles waiting for you in London!" You know those ones. Facebook does it too, just a little bit less flagrantly.
The second is the fact that Vodafone UK is serving up Malware. That's awesome.