Sophos, the anti-malware company, has just published its latest quarterly security report (PDF), and says:
From January to the end of March 2008, Sophos identified an average of more than 15,000 newly infected webpages each day. Most worrying for computer users, is the fact that the majority of these poisoned sites -- 79 percent -- are found on legitimate websites that have been hacked. February saw the website of UK broadcaster ITV fall victim to a poisoned web advert campaign which targeted both Windows and Mac users, while in March a Euro 2008 football ticket website was hacked by cybercriminals in an attempt to infect unwary fans. In contrast, just one in every 2500 emails is now infected, compared to one in every 909 in 2007.
What's also new is that the number of threats hosted in the US jumped to 42% while the number hosted in China tumbled to only 30%, putting the US on top in the race to infect users' machines. (I seem to recall that one excuse for China's position was the amount of out-of-date and unpatched pirate software. What's the US's excuse?)
"About 1 percent of web requests now deliver an infected page, most of which are legitimate websites belonging to people just trying to earn a living," says Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
