Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
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.
So however you look at it, you get fucked.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
> How many of those redirects lead to adult sites?
Probably not many. After all, porn sites actually have a legitimate (or at least legal) internet business model with revenue. Why do they need to infect their customers with malware? The newspapers on the other hand are struggling to figure out how to get people to pay for their content.
What's more, I imagine mostly lonely guys visit porn sites. And who are lonely guys? Geeks! (present company excluded, of course :). And geeks use Firefox, NoScript, etc., so they're hard to infect. If you want to build your fleet of rooted zombies, I'd imagine sites that a bunch of old people who are still using IE 5 on unpatched Windows 2000 is your best bet. And unless they've responded to a Viagra e-mail, I would guess grandma and grandpa aren't visiting porn sites.
JavaScript is not Java, and both the Adobe vulnerability and any SQL injection vulnerabilities that exist are the result of poor programming, not JS.
"If you see a man on a horse, he is likely an enemy. Kill the man and eat the horse."
What's more, I imagine mostly lonely guys visit porn sites. And who are lonely guys? Geeks!
Well, you'd be imagining wrong, because the correct answer to the question who visits porn sites is EVERYONE.
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.
Avast is free. It even says so in the summary.
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.
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.
...by avoiding non-porn sites altogether!