Amazon and GoDaddy Are the Biggest Malware Hosters

An anonymous reader writes "The United States is the leading malware hosting nation, with 44 percent of all malware hosted domestically, according to Solutionary. The U.S. hosts approximately 5 times more malware than the second-leading malware-hosting nation, Germany, which is responsible for 9 percent of the detected malware. The cloud is allowing malware distributors to create, host and remove websites rapidly, and major hosting providers such as Amazon, GoDaddy and Google have made it economical for malicious actors to use their services to infect millions of computers and vast numbers of enterprise systems."

Comments

no way the biggest hosts

[maliqua]

also host the most malware

mind blown

Re:no way the biggest hosts

[Arrogant-Bastard]

Your comment is funny, but misses the point about economics of scale.

Amazon, with its immense resources, should be one of the cleanest hosts on the planet. They can afford, using their spare change, to staff a 24x7 abuse desk with very senior people. The budgetary impact wouldn't even be a blip. And with the right people, suitably empowered, they could keep their operation nearly free of malware, phishing, spam, and other forms of abuse. They're far better positioned to do this than many smaller operations, who couldn't possibly afford it.

But they haven't. Why not? Is it because they don't know? Unlikely. Of course they know. Is it because they don't know how to address it? Equally unlikely. Of course they do. They have some smart people on staff. No, they know what the problem is AND they know how to fix it.

They just don't want to.

Because even as (relatively) small as those costs would be, it's still cheaper for them to externalize them to the entire rest of the Internet, and let all of us deal with it. So rather than taking professional responsibility for their own operation, they've decided to just blow it off. After all: who's going to make them?

I would say the same about GoDaddy, but it's not true. They actively support, encourage, and endorse spam, malware, phishing and every other form of abuse. They have from the beginning, only their method of lying about it has changed. (And don't forget GoDaddy's own history of self-promoting spam.) But once again: who's going to make them do anything differently?

Until operations are held accountable for their actions -- which is something that we USED to do on this network, a long time ago -- most won't bother. And that is, in large part, why problems like spam and phishing and malware are epidemic.

Expected

[kamapuaa]

Spinning this as a national issue is like saying "California has far more car accidents than Rhode Island." Of course it's true, but the US is far larger than (say) Germany, and has the largest hosting providers in the world. It would be a great surprise if the US wasn't in the lead.