How secure are you when you browse the internet from your computer? How secure is your financial data? Do you check what page you are going to visit? How safe is the page that you have just opened in your browser?
These are some questions that no one can answer for certain. With the increasing popularity of Internet in India, more and more population is being exposed to the world of internet. It is a known fact that most beginners will always use the default browser available on their PCs, which incidentally always turns out to be the infamous Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Even though Microsoft has come out with patches and a new version of their popular browser, most of the cyber cafes in the country still run IE6 as the only browser available on the system. An alarming number of people are not even aware of any other browser. So what happens when such people stumble across a webpage with malicious content? Do firewalls softwares actually help?
Antivirus and Anti-spyware vendor Sophos
has released a report, which says that there is an alarming rise in the number of maliciously infected web-pages on the web. There has been a 300 percent rise compared to that in 2007. The report says that every 5 seconds, a new web-page with malicious content is identified. That’s an astonishing number, considering the fact that it increases the chances of a visitor coming across the same web-page while browsing.
The report, which was prepared using data collected over the first 6 months of 2008, says that 16,000 websites are tagged as malicious every single day. An interesting thing to note is that, according to the report, Google-owned Blogger.com has been cited as the No. 1 host for malicious content. This can be credited to the fact that almost anyone with an email ID can create a blog on Blogger.com. A majority of beginners choose blogger as the platform they begin with, owing to its simplicity and the fact that it falls under Google’s roof. Similarly, Yahoo owned Geocities has also been identified as the simplest target. What blogger is to Blogs, Geocities is to web-sites.
The report says that 2 percent of all the websites identified are from Blogger.com. It is a no-shocker that 50% of all the corporate PCs are infected.
