More than 3 million Web pages on the Internet are malicious. According to Neils Provos, senior staff software engineer with Google, the percent is one in 1,000.The experts call these attacks "drive-by downloads". Their number increased although through firewalls and better security practices, Microsoft succeeded in stopping the viruses or worms to directly attack PCs.
Al Gore's site, Miami Dolphins and MySpace profile of Alicia Keys were those attacking the people who visited them. The problem is that the hackers improved their techniques. They are searching for programming errors and take advantages of them for installing the drive-by download software.
The visitor’s browser is redirected to a malicious Web server through an invisible iFrame page. Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft, declared that the criminals "are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks".
Google took attitude: the malicious pages were hunt, the drive-by-download sites identified and the costumers were warned before visiting them. With a 1.3 percent of Google’s searches was something wrong.But Provos was amazed to discover that "the adult-oriented pages" aren’t necessarily those with a high risk as expected, and that "staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough".
Another surprise was that China seemed to represent the greatest source of malicious Web sites. Google showed a countdown that starts with Korea’s 2 percent, Malaysia’s 2.2 percent, Russia’s 4 percent, U.S.’s 15 percent and it ends with China’s 67 percent of all malware distribution sites.
The criminals found in China the suitable circumstances for doing their job. They can be separated in two categories: those looking for banking password and teens desiring the World of Warcraft character. Before the Webmasters will imagine better protected sites, what you’ll need to do is turning on the automatic updates and install antivirus.
