14 DAY TRIAL // The Google employees are struggling to improve the security of their technology but, without support and statistics about the other services, it's extremely hard to manage to create a 100 percent safe solution. That's why they decided to conduct a special web research to find out how many Internet servers are distributing malware threats and what application is hosting them. Obviously, the most popular servers are Microsoft Internet Information Services and Apache. However, it seems like the two solutions are both hosting malware files, the percentage being at least impressive: 49 percent.
According to the research, more than 70.000 domains were analyzed, 66 percent being based on Apache, 23 percent on Microsoft IIS while 7 percent are using other server solutions.
"Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often (49% vs. 23%) as a malware distributing server. Amongst Microsoft IIS servers, the share of IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.0 remained the same at 80% and 20% respectively," Nagendra Modadugu, Anti-Malware Team at Google, said today.
The Apache servers are somehow more secure because most of the domains inspected by Google didn't provide any information about the version of the application. However, the top three detected were 1.3.37 (15%), 1.3.33 (7.91%), and 2.0.54 (6.25%).
"The distribution of top featured Apache server versions was different this time: 1.3.37 (50%), 1.3.34 (12%) and 1.3.33 (5%). 21% of the Apache servers did not report any version information. Incidentally, version 1.3.37 is the latest Apache server release in the 1.3 series, and it is hence somewhat of a surprise that this version features so prominently. One other factor we observe is a vast collection of Apache modules in use," the Google employee added.
The United States are still hosting the biggest amount of malicious servers, Apache being the main application used for web servers. However, Microsoft's IIS managed to conquer China, where it is installed on a huge number of computers.