Infected Web Site Numbers Soaring!

Written by Steve Gold
Reporting from Infosecurity Europe 2008
April 23, 2008
Original

At the Infosecurity Europe show, Sophos revealed that the numbers of infected Web sites detected by its research team, has soared in the last 12 months to a high of a new infected site appearing once every five seconds.

This, said Graham Cluley, the firm's senior security consultant, is upon last year's research, when new infected sites were appearing once every 14 seconds.

In parallel with the annual Security Threat Report, which detailed these findings, Cluley said that a number of 1980s viruses and malware, including the infamous Brain and MS-Word macro viruses, were now starting to re-appear.

"This is an interesting trend," he said, adding that it was clear that these reworked viruses and malware were the result of older hackers "coming out of the woodwork" and showing that these exploits were still viable.

"The worrying aspect of all this is that the organised crime gangs that account for most of the mainstream malware attacks these days, may hire these programmers and we could see a more advanced type of malware based on the old techniques," he told Infosecurity Magazine.

On the subject of the 2008 Threat Report, Cluley said that the concerning aspect of the survey is that a large number of the infected sites are owned by companies who are unaware their servers have been hi-jacked in this way.

Conventional IT security software, he said, cannot detect when a Web server has been hacked.

"There is also a problem in that the hacked pages don't contain malware, nor do they directly route to malware-infected pages. The pages route to multiple and nested URLs around the world," he said.

"Because of this, the firms concerned are often unaware their sites have been compromised. Perhaps worse, when our research team contacts them, the companies often don't believe us, as they think their Web servers are operating as normal," he added.

Against this backdrop, Cluley says that companies need to stay vigilant when it comes to protecting their IT resources and keep an open mind about new types of malware and hacker attacks.

Further details of the 2008 Security Threat Report are now available on the Sophos Web site.