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Your mother was right: some neighborhoods are more dangerous than others.
In a recently published paper, researchers at the University of Washington said that some Web wards are significantly more likely to host spyware and launch "drive-by downloads," the term for the hacker practice of using browser or Windows vulnerabilities to silently install software.
The nastiest Web neighborhoods? Games and celebrity-oriented sites.
"Our data shows that the most high-risk category is 'games,'" said the report. "Another is celebrity, for which over one in seven executables are infected with spyware."
In May and October 2005, Henry Levy and Steven Gribble, two University of Washington professors, sent customized Web crawlers scouring the Internet for spyware. Each foray sniffed through some 45,000 sites, then cataloged the executable files found and tested malicious sites' effectiveness by exposing unpatched versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox to drive-bys.
Levy and Gribble divided the sites into ten categories that ranged from games, news, and celebrity to adult, kids, and music.
One in five of gaming site hosted spyware, said Levy and Gribble, the highest percentage of any neighborhood. Music placed second on the shame list, with 11.4 percent of domains infected (about one in nine).
Internet districts such as news and kids, meanwhile, were much safer. No infected news domains were spotted by Levy and Gribble, and only 1.6 percent of kids' sites hosted spyware.
Other data, however, pointed to additional risky neighborhoods. More than one in ten executable files found on adult sites, for instance, were spyware-infected. Ditto for sites offering wallpaper (and screensaver) executable files. But the worst locale, as measured by infected executables, was gaming, where 16.3 percent of the files were plagued with spyware.
Read the entire article here,
http://www.securitypipeline.com/network/180207766
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