In their paper titled “The Ghost In The Browser Analysis of Web-based Malware” the research team at Google has come up with some startling revelations. In its analysis, it appears that one in ten Web pages may be infected with some type of malware. When I first read this, I was amazed that the number was that high.

Researcher Niels Provos wrote:

To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering. The user is presented with links that promise access to ‘interesting’ pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. A common example are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos.

Marking pages with a label allows users to avoid exposure to such sites and results in fewer users being infected. However, the task will not be easy. Finding all the web-based infection vectors is a significant challenge and requires almost complete knowledge of the web as a whole.

[Source: earthtimes.org]

My first thought is that this is going to be a monumental task if it’s true that 10% of all Web pages contain some type of illicit code. I’m not even sure if a company like Google is going to be able to identify every Web page that contains malware. I have never read any previous report which indicated this high of a number, but I do trust the stats that Google has compiled.

Comments welcome.

Google research paper in .pdf here.

[tags]google, report, malware, web pages, infections, [/tags]