Number of Infected Websites Almost Doubled During the Second Quarter

[JMH]

According to Web security vendor Dasient, a number of 1.3 million Web sites were infected by almost 200,000 different threats during Q2 2010.

"This quarter marks a significant spike in the number of infected websites - almost double the number of the previous quarter.

"Hackers have been very busy and are constantly coming up with new attacks," the vendor writes in its latest quarterly report.

In addition, the company points out that this is the first quarter when the number of infected websites has passed the one million mark.

The second quarter was also significant because the large number of new unique infections – over 58,000, of which 43,000 JavaScript and 15,000 IFrame injections.

Overall, the number of JavaScript injections has grown by 19% and that of malicious IFrames has decreased by 11%, clearly suggesting that attackers favor the first.

"JavaScripts have access to the DOM elements in the rest of the page, thereby giving attackers more information and more capability to 'muck' with the page.

"Scripts sourced in via IFRAMEs, by comparison, do not have the capability to access or communicate with the rest of the page," the Dasient researchers explain.

More -
Number of Infected Websites Almost Doubled During the Second Quarter - Softpedia

 

[bobtran]

This is why people must proactively keep their machines up to date on patches, AV and exercise a lot of common sense or good anti-spyware tools if you lack said common sense.

An ounce of prevention is definitely better than a pound of restore.

I use/recommend "Secunia Personal Software Inspector" to assist with the monitoring. I have found it to be a good tool since i started using it to help me monitor for new versions of installed products and their posted vulnerabilities.

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

 

[bigcitycat]

This is why I use noscript on Firefox and Privoxy for IE.

 

[marsmimar]

Interesting read. Especially the part about "A tendency to launch such attacks during weekends has also been observed." Thanks for the link.

 

[Layback Bear]

I also use "Secunia Personal Software Inspector". I think its a must.

 

[oracle2b]

I don't feel bad about blocking ad servers because they could be compromised . Secunia PSI has been a staple on my windows machines since I started using vista. Default security isn't sufficient to protect yourself against threats that are appearing on even the most credible sites.