Google drive-by malware analysis
Spyware July 31st, 2008Most malicious drive-by activity is down to computers in China, says a Google engineer.
Speaking at the Usenix security conference, about 67% of sites which “secretly drop malicious software onto visitors’ computers” are located in China, as are 64% of the compromised servers, CNET News has Niels Provos stating.
“Web based malware is a significant problem and … there is no real good proactive defense against this,” he said.
Google analysed 66 million unique URLs and found 3.5 million had malware, according to the story, which goes on:
There was a 90 percent detection rate and the false positive rate was 0.1 percent, according to Provos.
The analysis is part of Google’s efforts to steer Web surfers clear of sites with malicious software that can install malware on their computers and turn them into zombies on a botnet, which is a growing problem on the Internet.
The company is using its crawlers to feed up search results when someone “googles” something to analyze the sites that come up.
Twelve percent of the malware infections were due to ads, based on search traffic, adds the story.
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Google drive-by malware analysis
