g O-O gle has eyes&ears...

June 2009

Google’s online security helps fight malware. Google’s online security recently started to identify web pages that infect computers via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically. During that time they have investigated billions of URLs and found more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites automatically installing malware. Third-party content is one avenue for malicious activity. Today, a lot of third-party content is due to advertising. In Google’s analysis, they found that on average 2 percent of malicious web sites were delivering malware via advertising. The underlying problem is that advertising space is often syndicated to other parties who are not known to the web site owner. In addition, Google’s security team also investigated the structural properties of malware distribution sites. Some malware distribution sites had as many as 21,000 regular web sites pointing to them. It was also found that the majority of malware was hosted on web servers located in China. Interestingly, Chinese malware distribution sites are mostly pointed to by Chinese web servers. Google says they are constantly scanning their index for potentially dangerous sites. Their automated search systems found more than 4,000 different sites that appeared to be set up for distributing malware by massively compromising popular web sites