It's a Dangerous Web out there, says Google

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Randall [rvh40 () insightbb com]
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 2:56 PM
To: David Farber; Dewayne Hendricks; johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com
Subject: It's a Dangerous Web out there, says Google

[Interestingly enough, F-Secure occasionally complains about
"Suspicious web-traffic activity"  when "a web site tries to exploit
a known vulnerability".  The most common site I've noticed to kick
off this alert?   Gmail.com.



Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

Sat Feb 16, 8:30 AM ET


The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research
published recently by Google.



The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions
of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that
tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of
them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious,
according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.



These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security
experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls
and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for
worms and viruses to directly attack computers.



In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"
movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of
Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.



Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built
very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking
for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the
drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame
page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web
server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC.
"The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those
attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security
vendor Grisoft.



In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it
has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can
identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before
they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search
queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.



Some of the data surprised Provos.



"When we started going into this I had the firm intuition that if you
go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.



It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer
than its red-light districts.



"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going
to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious
software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a
huge difference."



"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't
good enough," he noted.



Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest
source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67
percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The
second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia,
(4 percent) Malaysia (2.2 percent) and Korea (2 percent).



It costs next-to-nothing to register a Web domain in China and
service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said
Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know
they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."



Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories,
Thompson said: fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and
teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.



So how to stop this growing pestilence?



Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic
updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as
possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.



But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about
building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts
on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.



http://tinyurl.com/3xv3bb

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