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

[Anonymous Coward]

It is exactly what Cisco said see here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/vpndevc/annual_security_report.html

Re:Thanks Google

[History's Coming To]

Did you check out Google's information on government/police/court requests for info and takedowns in the UK? Around 4,000 incidents in total, and over 2,000 of them were regarding AdWords. Not Youtube, or Blogger, or G+ or Google Pages, but AdWords. Looks like they're well aware of the problems, to the point of government agencies taking regular action over it. Thing is, this is the thing that makes them an enormous amount of money...

Full breakdowns by country here