GSGKT writes “Google’s Anti-Malware Team has made available some of their research data on malware distribution mechanisms while the research paper[PDF] is under peer review. Among their conclusions are that the majority of malware distribution sites are hosted in China, and that 1.3% of Google searches return at least one link to a malicious site. The lead author, Niels Provos, wrote, ‘It has been over a year and a half since we started to identify web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time we’ve investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million one-of-a-kind URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. During the course of our research, we’ve investigated not only the prevalence of drive-by downloads but also how users are being exposed to malware and how it is being distributed.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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