Online Ads Are More Dangerous Than Porn, Cisco Says

wiredmikey writes "The popular belief is that security risks increase as the user engages in riskier and shadier behavior online, but that apparently isn't the case, Cisco found in its 2013 Annual Security report. It can be more dangerous to click on an online advertisement than an adult content site these days, according to Cisco. For example, users clicking on online ads were 182 times more likely to wind up getting infected with malware than if they'd surfed over to an adult content site, Cisco said. The highest concentration of online security targets do not target pornography, pharmaceutical, or gambling sites as much as they affect legitimate sites such as search engines, online retailers, and social media. Users are 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping sites and 27 more times likely with a search engine than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site, according to Cisco's report (PDF). There is an overwhelming perception that people get compromised for 'going to dumb sites,' Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at Cisco, told SecurityWeek."

Comments

Re:TFA got the probabilities backward

[phaunt]

...and Slashdot's title for the story that "Online Ads Are More Dangerous Than Porn" takes it still a level further. It's certainly not what Cisco said.

Why is this even news?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been known for a long time that ads are a primary malware vector, this is the reason many sane people block them.

This is why I block ads

[jbmartin6]

This was always my response to the 'it is immoral to block ads' argument. I always said that if blah.com is hosting the ads itself I would be willing to allow them but as long as the content is from some unknown domain that I haven't chosen to trust, forget about it.