China hosts the majority of malware infected pages

Dec 3, 2007 21:06 GMT  ·  By

China is the land of malware-equipped websites. At least this is what the latest research, signed by security vendor Sophos, has revealed. According to the results, China is hosting the largest amount of malware-infected websites, with no less than 55.2 percent of the total number of malware pages. The second place was won by United States with 19.7 percent, while Russia came the third with 11.4 percent.

The interesting facts come from the new entries, as Turkey is now ranked the 6th with 1.4 percent, while Poland won the 8th place with 0.7 precent. Sure, this is not much, but it's pretty obvious that websites hosted in these countries represent a real danger for our computers.

"The big three - China, the US and Russia- continue to dominate the chart, accounting for more than 85 percent of all infected webpages world-wide. Despite this, the fluctuation in the rest of the chart, highlighted by the four new entries this month, shows that this is very much a global problem. To stop it turning into a major pandemic, web hosts throughout the world would be well advised to clean up their sites and quash the hackers by installing web security protection," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said.

It was already known the fact that China hosts a very large amount of malware websites. In fact, China offers numerous illegal activities. Just think at the recent spam campaigns targeting the Google search results, which were hosted on newly registered Chinese domains. In addition, the hack attacks over several websites that proved to be launched from China also support this statement.

Russia, one of the candidates to the leader position is only ranked as the third country hosting malware, with only 11.4 percent. In the past, it was said that Russia is the land of illegal content as any user could buy a pirated software for no less than 3 Euro.