Google was recently reported to have said that 1 in every 10 web pages, investigated by it, are containing malicious software, which could potentially contaminate a user’s computer. The majority of the infested web pages included unseen codes with the aim of attempting to pilfer private info for example passwords.
For their study, researchers at Google surveyed 4.5 million pages to “in-depth analysis” and detected that almost 450,000 of them could launch purported “drive-by downloads”, sites, which are said to deploy nasty code, like spyware, but for the prior consent of user. An extra 700,000 pages were thought of having code that might compromise a user’s PC.
In the report, published in the paper titled The Ghost In The Browser, Google researcher Niels Provos writes,
To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering. The user is presented with links that promise access to ‘interesting’ pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos.
Researchers also reported that hackers were targeting whole Web servers, in order to change about each page on the compromised server into a malware host. They were exploiting blog comment characteristics and further Web 2.0 methods of obtaining user-created content as techniques to encourage malware sites or to disseminate software-based attacks.
