Security company Sophos has revealed that it identified an average of 15,000 malware pages a day throughout the first quarter of this year. That’s astaggering one every five seconds. Of those, 79% are completely legitimate sites that have been hacked, they warned. However, the number of infected e-mails has dropped dramatically to one in2,500, much better than one in 909 last year. More than half of the malware Sophos found was Mal/Iframe and Mal/ObfJS, which exploit vulnerabilities to take over sites. Remarkably,there’s been a massive drop in Chinese-hosted infected pages, but now the US hosts almost half the infected pages, with the UK responsible for just over one per cent. Carole Theriault,senior security consultant at Sophos, said, “About one per cent of web requests now deliver an infected page, most of which are legitimate websites belonging to people just trying to earna living. Already in 2008 we have been reminded that it is not just the small, independent sites that are being hacked. With compromised websites of household names now serving up malware, it is moreimportant than ever for users to ensure that they use a fully protected machine, and for businesses to protect their web servers from attack.”
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