Regular Domains Have More Malware Than Porn Sites

SnugglesTheBear writes "New research pours scorn on the comforting but erroneous belief that Windows surfers who avoid smut and wares on the Web are likely to avoid exposure to malware. A study by free anti-virus firm Avast found 99 infected legitimate domains for every infected adult website. In the UK, Avast found that more infected domains contained the word 'London' than the word 'sex.' Among the domains labeled as infected by Avast was the smartphones section of the Vodafone UK website. The mobile phone operator's site contained a malicious JavaScript redirect script that attempted to take advantage of an unpatched Windows Help and Support Centre flaw (CVE-2010-1885) to infect the machines of visiting surfers."

"London" is a heavily spammed term

[Animats]

"London", as a keyword, is a heavy spam target. I used to use "London Hotels" as a test case for SiteTruth's web spam detector. [sitetruth.com] Google used to do badly on that search. (Since they started handling travel destinations as a special case, the first 10 Google results are now either paid ads or results from the business search engine.)

Re:How is this useful stats?

[crazypip666]

I assure you there aren't. If you believe this story [slashdot.org], then more than a third of the internet is porn.

Re:What are the percentages?

[wisnoskij]

Over 37% of the internet is porn (http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/16/1722258/Over-a-Third-of-the-Internet-Is-Pornographic)

therefore porn sites have a far smaller probability for malware then non porn sites.

Re:"sex" is too vanilla to sell

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets check the current list of smut...

bigtube.com
deviantclip.com
extremetube.com
fantasti.cc
hardsextube.com
new.hardcoreporntube.com
newsextube.org
pornhub.com
pornmix.com
slutload.com
spankwire.com
stileproject.com
tnaflix.com
wankspider.com
xhamster.com
xvideos.com
youporn.com

    11.76% contain sex. And none will make you contract viruses of the electronic nor STD varieties.

Re:Java Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

javascript isn't java

What is this world coming too....

[puppetman]

when swingers are more likely to have an STD than a prostitute [reuters.com] and a regular domain has more malware than a porn site.

Obviously, the sex-professionals, be it high tech or human beings, are far more careful than an amateur.

Re:The question is

[BenoitRen]

Exactly. 99 regular sites infected to 1 porn site infected is rather telling if there are 1000 times more regular sites, which would mean that you have a ten-fold increase in risk on porn sites.

Way to miss the point, which is that avoiding porn sites doesn't mean you won't get infected. This proves that there are many regular sites out there that are infected, ratio of anything be damned.

As usual, this is a non-story that boils down to nothing more than a press release for Avast: "You're at risk! Buy our crap which will slow down your computer and probably won't detect much anyways!"

Avast is free. It even says so in the summary.

Re:What are the percentages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fifty-eight times higher, I believe, based on recent data that 37% of websites are porn.

Re:The question is

[FlyMysticalDJ]

being a porn site isn't the silver bullet that means you will make money. Also, there was a slashdot article [slashdot.org] saying that more porn sites were infected than expected. I'm not exactly sure how these two articles mesh up, but specifically that article had said that people in the porn industry tend to trade content to lower operating costs. So all it takes is one link in the chain putting malware in that content to infect multiple sites.

Re:The question is

[Syncdata]

A few rebuttles to your comment and others on this thread. Downloaded plugins and such are not necessary on a website for malware to transfer. All that is necessary is for an advertisement to load which contains the means for a cross site scripting attack. You don't even have to click on anything once you visit the site.

And yes, these attacks happen on totally legitimate sites that are not very discriminating on the ads they run, or whose admins do not properly defend their server against worms/ teh h4x.

XSS attacks are the #1 growing attack technique by far. As long as there is money to be made in infecting computers, techniques will get more advanced as offense is always ahead of defense in terms of Malware/AV software. Simple image and video content is all you need to transfer malware.

I wish it was as easy as saying "Obey these 3 rules and you will not be infected", but that is simply not the case anymore. The people that write this software are honest to God,legitimate, Software Developers. You don't have to like em, but you do have to respect em.

The only way to be 100% certain that you do not end up with malware at the end of the day is not AV software, it's not being cautious, it's not using a mac or linux, it's virtualized environments. And one of these days, even that might not be a panacea.

Re:"sex" is too vanilla to sell

[Anonymous Coward]

tube8.com
redtube.com