If in the past your way to stay safe on the Web was to not visit dodgy sites like gambling, porn, piracy or other "unsafe district" locations, that strategy no longer works. Google released brand new data today that shows you are much more likely to be infected by malware visiting normal websites that have been compromised by the bad guys and made into drive-by attack territory.
Google's Safe Browsing program flags and warns users about well over 10K malicious and/or suspicious website every day. The scary part of the report is the amount of legitimate compromised sites hosting malware compared to sites specifically developed by the bad guys for malicious purposes. Here are the numbers; first week of Jun/2013, 37,000 legitimate sites were compromised to host malware. At the same time, they found only 4,000 sites that were developed for the unique purpose of infecting people. The upshot?
Nine out of ten times your malware infection comes from a legit site that has been compromised! Here is the graph:
It is more and more important, today more than ever, to keep your PC up to date. Turn ON Microsoft's automatic patches for every Tuesday of the month, and update all your applications by running a free tool like secunia, which alerts you to old versions of your non-microsoft applications and help you to upgrade to the latest patched and secure versions. So, as always, THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK and keep your PC up to date!
