Ten per cent of websites contain malware

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Around ten per cent of websites carry trojans that can infect a user's computer, according to study carried out by Google researchers.

Researchers at the company looked at 4.5m websites over the last year and found that over 450,000 of them contains some form of malware that forced computers into downloading trojans, keyloggers and other types of malware.

The "Ghost in the Browser" report from the search company found that another 700,000 sites contain malware to install bot on a machine and turn it into a zombie computer to be used by hackers to launch denial of service attacks against infrastructure.

"Our study has found a large number of websites responsible for compromising the browsers of visiting users. The sophistication of adversaries has increased over time and exploits are becoming increasingly more complicated and difficult to analyse," said the research team leader Niels Provos.

"Unfortunately, average computer users have no means to protect themselves from this threat. Their browser can be compromised just by visiting a web page and become the vehicle for installing multitudes of malware on their systems," he said.

He said the team expected the majority of malware to no longer spreading via remote exploitation but via web-based infection.

"This rationale can be motivated by the fact that the computer of an average user provides a richer environment for adversaries to mine, for example, it is more likely to find banking transactions and credit card numbers on a user's machine than on a compromised server," said Provos.

The full report can be found here.

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