It’s Official: The Internet is Mostly Comprised of Junk, Spam, and Malicious Content, Are You Adding To It?
Website Security Labs is a company that uses a system called “HoneyPot” to scour the web at 40 million websites an hour searching for spam and malicious sites. What they uncovered is probably what you expected. Ninety five percent of all user generated content on the web is spam or malicious. Here’s what they found
- 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends ) led to malware.
- The second half of 2009 revealed a 3.3% decline in the growth of malicious Web sites compared to the first half of the year. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages.
- However, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, Websense Security labs saw an average of 225% growth in malicious Web Sites.
- 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
- 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
- Consistent with previous years, 51% of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the United States.
- China remains second most popular malware hosting country with 17%, but during the last six months Spain jumped into the third place with 15.7% despite never having been in the top 5 countries before.
- 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
- Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
- Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
- 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
- 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.