50,000 Websites Attempting To Infect Visitors

I guess the WWW tag which stands for World Wide Web tends to turn into Wild Wild Web as more and more hackers attack famous websites to exploit users' computers. According to Mark Hofman of SANS Internet Storm Center, there are no less than 52,000 infected websites which attempt to install executable files and other malicious pieces of codes. Most attacks are based on iframe components which are often hidden from visitors' eyes, aiming to redirect people to other and more dangerous pages. At this time, most infected .exe files are blocked by the majority of the antivirus solutions but as the technique evolves, the attacks become more and more dangerous for us.

"The good news so far is that the executable being downloaded seems to be detected by most AV products. The sad news is that when I checked the other day the number of infected sites was about 30K and now about 52K sites," Mark Hofman wrote on the SANS page.

It appears that today's hackers also tried to conduct malicious actions some time ago when they first targeted Super Bowl webpages and its fans' computers. "Remember the Super Bowl infection back in February? Mass defacement, using SQL Injection, downloading a file (although almost everything does that nowadays)," the security expert continued.

It was already known the fact that hackers aim to infect more and more pages to redirect the users to other dangerous websites where they can install and exploit the vulnerabilities without any restriction. Just look at Google for example. We all know Google's page is visited by millions of consumers every day and this requires a perfect security system to protect all of them. But a single vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox (by the way, it is still unpatched) could allow an attacker to view private information stored in the Google accounts.

So, is there anything to do to remain protected against all these threats? Actually there is, if you're a paranoiac computer user: install a powerful security solution bundled with an antivirus and avoid opening untrusted websites, emails, instant messengers, PDF files, audio files and many other formats of digital content.

For more information about the dangerous websites which attempt to infect visitors, click here.