Websense: 60 of Top 100 Sites Pushing Malware

Last week, Authentium partner Websense published some rather interesting statistics about what users can expect to find on the top-ranked web sites. In summary, what users can expect to find, at 60% of these sites, is malware.

"60 percent of the top 100 most popular Web sites either hosted malicious content or contained a masked redirect to lure unsuspecting victims from legitimate sites to malicious sites - Websense Security Labs."

Note that Websense in not just saying "60 leading websites" - it is saying specifically that 60 of the top 100 ranked web sites either directly or indirectly (i.e. via a link) delivered some form of malware or link to malware - to their visitors.

Part of the reason for this may be that 45 of the 100 web sites that Websense Security Labs studied support user-generated content, such as the posting of images, videos, audio files, messages, comments, email attachments, etc.

Unsurprisingly, given the rise we've seen in sophisticated key-loggers and screen-stealers in the wild, the Websense Threatseeker Network found that 29% of the malware discovered involved a key-logger, screen-stealer, or some other form of data capture malware.

More statistics can be found at the Websense site.