The latest research from Websense Security Labs paints a dreary but familiar picture of the state of online security threats. Echoing the bad news of other such recent reports, it seems the vast majority of the Web consists of malware and spam.
Worse yet, even legitimate, well-known sites are being used to pump malware, SEO poisoning, or phishing attacks. Websense uses a global network of systems to scan and analyze over 40 billion websites every hour, tracking malware and other unwanted content. The results for the latter half of 2009 show a 225 percent increase in malicious websites. Worse, 71 percent of websites found to contain some malicious code were in fact legitimate websites that had been compromised in some way. One way that hackers are infiltrating the Web is by "SEO poisoning," or using SEO techniques to pump up the ranking of malicious websites in search results to make them appear legitimate. On average, 14 percent of top search results for a given "hot" topic on Google led to a malicious website.
