Just Five Seconds Needed to Find a New Infected Website

Security company Sophos has just published the latest Security Threat Report concerning the first quarter of 2008, revealing that a new malicious website is now detected and blocked every five seconds. This is a time decrease of 9 seconds as the company detected similar websites every 14 seconds, according to the 2007 report. Going further to the countries that hosted the largest amount of malware in the first quarter of 2008, the United States took the leader chair with 42 percent while China came the second with 30.1 percent.

Russia was placed on the 3rd position with 10.3 percent while Germany is only the fourth with 2.2 percent. China's evolution is pretty remarkable because the latest reports showed the Asian country hosting more than a half of the total amount of malware. However, the US remains one of the top countries when talking about this matter as it's quite a popular presence in such ranks.

"The US and China are no strangers to this chart, with the two countries long holding the top two spots in this hall of shame. However, the bottom half of the chart remains fluid, indicating that users need to remain vigilant, and those hosting websites need to ensure that they have patched against vulnerabilities that might be lurking on their site to avoid becoming part of the problem," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.

Another interesting finding of the report is that most infected websites were actually legitimated pages which got compromised by hackers who managed to inject a dangerous code into their sources. Sophos reported that no less than 15,000 infected websites are spotted every day and one percent of the total web requests return an infected page.

"About 1 percent of web requests now deliver an infected page, most of which are legitimate websites belonging to people just trying to earn a living. Already in 2008 we’ve been reminded that it’s not just the small, independent sites that are being hacked. With compromised websites of household names now serving up malware, it’s more important than ever for users to ensure that they’re using a fully protected machine, and for businesses to protect their web servers from the risk of attack," the Sophos expert added.

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