Infected legitimate websites outscore adult 99:1

Help Net Security ^

[Gomez]

For every infected adult domain identified, there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected, according to a report by Avast.

In the UK for example, there are more infected domains containing the word "London" than any other domain containing the word "sex". The latest discovery of an infected site is the Vodafone UK website. This infection in the smart phones section shows how advanced the bad guys are at finding ways to deliver the malware to the internet users.

The infection of Vodafone, which was confirmed as still present on the morning of Monday 28th of June, 2010, is an HTML:Script-inf and it is an evolution of JS:illRedir and JS:ilIiframe exploits.

This type of infection is widespread and accounts for 20% of all infected UK pages. The infection takes advantage of a two week old Microsoft Windows vulnerability.

As Avast CTO Ondrej Vlcek explains "The problem is particularly bad because the CVE-2010-1885 vulnerability targets the most widely used version of Windows, and at the present time it is still un-patched. This means that even if a user is running a fully updated Windows XP SP3 with all the security patches, the user is still vulnerable."

[Gomez]

Dispelling the myth that only perverts and miscreants get infected ping.

[Artemis Webb]

It's my a good friend of mine's experience that the words "free games" will get you into a lot more attack sites than the words "naked women".

[ShadowAce]

[TSgt]

There are naked women on the internet?

I’m going to have to investigate this allegation...

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[GOPJ]

I googled "naked women" and got this:

Monk arrested for filming naked women‎ - 3 hours ago Khai was taken to the custody after a victim informed cops about the video clips showing the naked women had been shared via mobile phones. ... Expressindia.com - 9 related articles »

[GOPJ]

I googled "naked women" and got this:

Phnom Penh A mucky Buddhist monk has been arrested over filming women who stripped off for a dip in holy water at a temple in Cambodia.

Net Khai, 37, is facing imprisonment for a year and has been taken off his religious status after cops caught him spying on women who had gone to him for blessings.

http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Monk-arrested-for-filming-naked-women/640488/

[driftdiver]

Childrens and teen websites are also very bad. I think because kids are not as careful about what they click on.

[a fool in paradise]

There are naked women on the internet? I’m going to have to investigate this allegation...

Be a careful out there...

The Naked Cowgirl Fires Back (CNN Monday, June 28, 2010)

[doodad]

I can attest to this as my wife does geneology and many of those do it yourself sites are infected.

[stylin_geek]

I tracked down a Teachers union web site that was infected.

I found it through teachers at my site accessing their union web site.

I wasn’t pleased and neither was the district office.

[zeugma]

The only real solution to this is to use operating systems and browsers that are not as susceptible to malware. Linux and OSX have shown a great deal of resistance to malware of all kinds.

[TexasRepublic]

“The only real solution to this is to use operating systems and browsers that are not as susceptible to malware. Linux and OSX have shown a great deal of resistance to malware of all kinds.”

Totally agreed. Nothing is 100% immune, but most infections target the architecture of Windows specifically. It would be a safe guess that most of them modify the Windows Registry. Guess what? Linux does not have a registry. What is a poor virus to do?

[zeugma]

Totally agreed. Nothing is 100% immune, but most infections target the architecture of Windows specifically. It would be a safe guess that most of them modify the Windows Registry. Guess what? Linux does not have a registry. What is a poor virus to do?

Pretty much. The registry is the root of many ms-windows problems. That and the fact that so many users run as an administrator. With Linux, this is fairly rare except for certain really stripped down distros designed for netbooks.  Similarly, OSX discourages folk from running as an administrative user. On my mother-in-law's Mac Mini, I don't think she even enabled the admin user.

Another major pitfall is the fact that the OS executes things based on their filename (.com, .bat, .exe, etc.). Linux and OSX has no such paradign. In order for a file to be run as a program, it must be marked as executable. This provides another layer of abstraction between downloading and running a program.

From what I understand Win 7 is better about it's succeptability to viruses, but that's just hearsay for me, as I'll never use it so it really doesn't matter to me.

As you said, nothing is 100% immune, because no matter what safeguards you have in place, you can't prevent a user from downloading something and installing it if they insist upon it, but the architecture of Unix-based system seems to be safer than the alternatives.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The only real solution to this is to use operating systems and browsers that are not as susceptible to malware. Linux and OSX have shown a great deal of resistance to malware of all kinds.

You can't say that!

It's true, but you can't say that.