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One Million Sites Infected With Malware In Q2

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the show-me-the-pinkee dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "More than one million Web domains were infected with malicious code in the second quarter of 2010 — around one percent of all active Web domains, according to new data. The number of infected domains was extrapolated from data gained through a sample scan of what Dasient describes as 'millions of Web sites,' as well as from customer deployments. It suggests that compromises of Web sites are on the rise, as attackers look to push out malicious programs through so-called drive by download attacks."

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. *domains* infected? What? by Kaz+Kylheku · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A domain is a node in the DNS namespace. How does that get infected?

    If a web server hosts 20 domains, and is infected, does that count as 20 infections?

    "Web site", "domain" and "host" are not interchangeable.

  2. Less and less active... by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It seems like in reality virus/adware/spyware infections are down to very, very low levels.

    It used to be in the late 90s to early-to-mid 2000s there would be people left and right with adware that popped up stuff and computers would grind to a halt. Today, I'm not seeing that on anyone's computer that I've done tech support for. I have seen a bunch of systems grind to a halt due to Norton/McAfee, but none caused by viruses/spyware/adware/etc. The only thing I can think of is that IE7 and beyond stepped up security enough to make a major impact.

    So even though "threat analyzers" pull up scary numbers, I'm not seeing the results in the wild.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Less and less active... by HungryHobo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      it just means the malware authors have grown up and want a paycheck.
      It used to be that half the viruses were showy things written by amatures who wanted to fuck around.
      most of the rest were trying to cash in on ad revenue from popups.

      Now there's less money in popups(most of the big ad providers don't like being associated with malware) so the malware just sits quietly trying to steal your credit card number.
      The more stealthy the more successful.