Did you know that one web page or website is infected every five seconds? Sophos, a security vendor, stated that an average of over 15,000 web pages were compromised daily between the months of January and March of 2008. For a comparison, for the whole year of 2007 their were about 6,000 daily infections which equals about one every 14 seconds. This is absolutely unbelievable if you look at this astronomical growth rate of infected web pages.
Sophos additionally reported that 79 percent of the infected or compromised web pages tracked this year belong to legitimate websites. Many big companies' websites have fallen into the "infected by malware" category lately.
Spam related web pages are on the rise also. It is reported that a daily average of 23,300 pages were found to be spam web pages during the months January, February and March of 2008. To break that down into daily terms it equals about one spam web page discovered every 3 seconds. This is alarming and can be hard to understand how hackers can be this busy. In a lot of cases it is not all hackers that spam websites, sometimes it is every-day business or clever home computer users.
Spam emails have died down maybe due to the powerful software that is readily available. It has been a 40 percent decline in the amount of spam emails messages since last year as reported by Sophos. Either way, most of us still combat spam emails on a daily bases.
What can we do about this?
Web pages will be attacked and we will get spam messaged from time to time, it is almost a certainty. We can all do our part by keeping our spyware, virus, firewall and spam protection software up-to-date. Becoming educated on the latest threats and compromised websites arms us with the understanding and know-how to combat certain attacks. We can be located in the United States, which is still the top contributor of spam, in Russia, China, Brazil or Turkey and still have a valid threat in our presence. There is no hiding from infected web pages or spam when you look at the number of attacks but we still have a chance by watching where we step on the internet.