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40 percent malicious websites hosted in the US – AVG |
AVG Technologies, which makes the popular free anti-virus software AVG, released the results of a research study which shows that – contrary to popular opinion – the most malicious websites are hosted on US servers and not in other countries like China.
AVG said its research study is based on the analysis of threats reported during the last six months from AVG’s 110 million worldwide users of its LinkScanner web security product. The research indicates an increase in malware serving websites targeting end users, which typically focus on stealing online banking information, credit card information, personal identities and passwords to social sites.
The detection and analysis of exploits was based on AVG’s unique crowd-sourced methods for analyzing web content for malicious or dangerous intent as reported by AVG’s vast network of LinkScanner installations worldwide. AVG’s research shows that malicious code is not just an issue with outlaw servers located in countries with weak laws and lax enforcement. Monitoring active web servers serving exploits around the world indicates that 44 percent of the corrupted servers are hosted in the United States, followed by Germany and China at just 5 percent each. What's more, many of these malware-serving websites are in fact legitimate sites that have been compromised by hackers to serve exploits on their behalf. In all, exploitive servers were found in nearly 4,600 locations throughout the US.
AVG points out that the research does not shed any light on who owns or is directing the efforts of these servers. It says those cybercriminals and/or criminal networks could be anywhere in the world – and they are.
"The results of this study shatter the myth that malicious code is primarily hosted in countries where e-crime laws are less developed,” said Karel Obluk, Chief Technology Officer, AVG Technologies. He said AVG's research shows that malicious content is much more likely to show up on web servers in the US than in Asian or Eastern European countries.
“This makes perfect sense since the USA is a primary target market for the criminals and has rich and mature Internet infrastructure making the threats both highly accessible and cheap to host,” Obluk said. He said it was “striking”that there was a clear rise in the number of malicious servers in the last six months. “Today’s hacking techniques are highly evasive so the average user cannot tell if a website is serving malware or not.”
Obluk continued, "Even more important to note is that, on average during this six month period, about 50 percent of the domains hosted on these servers were online and hosting threats only one day or less. This transient nature makes them very hard to find and add to traditional reputation-based protection systems in time to be helpful to users."
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