Websense Internet Security Report
This week, Websense published its State of Internet Security report for the first half of the year. Here are some things to take away from it:
Legit Sites with Malicious Code – Most of the sites that contain malicious code are legitimate and have been compromised. This number went up 50 percent over the past six months. The growing popularity of sites with user-contributed content is opening holes in areas of the Web that people consider trustworthy. Sixty percent of the top 100 sites have been involved in some kind of malicious activity this year.
“Blended Threats” Increase – Continually increasing amounts of e-mails contain a link to a spam site or a site with malicious code. “Storm” attacks are making it more difficult to create anti-virus solutions because of their use of a mixture of attack vectors.
More Shopping Spam – Shopping has overtaken pornography as the category of spam you are most likely to see. This could be caused by spammers using information gathered from social networking sites to tailor their messages to the victim’s interests.
Websense summarizes by predicting that reputation-based site filtering will become less effective as hackers continue to focus on attacking legitimate sites through their Web 2.0 security holes. They also advise companies to take a more data-centric approach to security in order to protect against blended attacks which can circumvent defenses that only focus on one technology.
