6 Million Internet Pages Infected During Q3'09

Dasient reports that over 640,000 web sites were infected in Q3 2009.

Web security vendor Dasient reports that over 640,000 web sites--or rather somewhere over 5.8 million pages--were infected by more than 52,000 "distinct" threats during Q3 2009. The company has discovered during the last six months that attackers are focused on compromising legitimate websites and using them to distribute malware. This ultimately hurts the online economy, with trusted sites losing traffic, revenue, and "damage to brand equity" thanks to malware infection.

"While it often takes only a couple of infected pages to harm users or land a site on one of the many blacklists, our research suggests that when sites are infected, the bad code is installed on a significant portion of the pages on those sites," the company said. "In Q3'09, the infections on newly compromised sites of 10 pages or more spread to an average of 19-percent of those sites' pages."

But 640,000 infected websites in just one quarter is a substantial number, larger in scale compared to Microsoft's numbers released back in April 2009 (3 million pages per quarter). Dasient said that Google's blacklist has more than doubled in the last year, and on certain occasions has added 40,000 new sites per week. Does the Internet sound like a dangerous place? It should for those surfing the Web unprotected.

The report also indicates that 54.8-percent of the malware attacks in Q3 were classified as JavaScript, with iFrame-based attacks ranking in at a close second with 37.1-percent. "Other" attacks only accounted for 8.1-percent of the quarter.