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."

Comments

"London" is a heavily spammed term

[Animats]

"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.)

Re:What are the percentages?

[wisnoskij]

Over 37% of the internet is porn (http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/16/1722258/Over-a-Third-of-the-Internet-Is-Pornographic)

therefore porn sites have a far smaller probability for malware then non porn sites.

Re:"sex" is too vanilla to sell

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets check the current list of smut...

bigtube.com
deviantclip.com
extremetube.com
fantasti.cc
hardsextube.com
new.hardcoreporntube.com
newsextube.org
pornhub.com
pornmix.com
slutload.com
spankwire.com
stileproject.com
tnaflix.com
wankspider.com
xhamster.com
xvideos.com
youporn.com

    11.76% contain sex. And none will make you contract viruses of the electronic nor STD varieties.

Re:The question is

[BenoitRen]

Exactly. 99 regular sites infected to 1 porn site infected is rather telling if there are 1000 times more regular sites, which would mean that you have a ten-fold increase in risk on porn sites.

Way to miss the point, which is that avoiding porn sites doesn't mean you won't get infected. This proves that there are many regular sites out there that are infected, ratio of anything be damned.

As usual, this is a non-story that boils down to nothing more than a press release for Avast: "You're at risk! Buy our crap which will slow down your computer and probably won't detect much anyways!"

Avast is free. It even says so in the summary.