In a press release last week, Symantec revealed the top 100 dirtiest websites, but less than half of them (48%) were dirty in the way you’re thinking. The majority of the list’s subject matter features less scandalous content like catering, figure skating, legal services, and buying electronics.
Websites that made the list represent the “worst of the worst” based on the number of threats detected by Norton Safe Web. Without downloading or clicking on anything in particular, you risk exposing your computer to infection and revealing your personal and financial information into the hands of cyber criminals. Simply visiting one of these websites could infect your computer, so we don’t recommend you actually visit any of the websites that made the list.
So what makes these websites so dirty? Malware, security risks like phishing, and browser exploits top the list. In fact, the average number of threats found on the top dirtiest sites is… (ready for this?) 18,000, and 40 of the top 100 dirtiest websites have more than 20,000 unique threats each lurking in the shadows waiting to exploit unknowing visitors.
Symantec found the dirty websites by crawling the web using web forensic techniques like file scanning, IDS (intrusion detection systems), behavioral detection, and install/uninstall analysis to find security risks. In addition, Symantec has more than 20 million active contributors in the Norton Community Watch program. You can see dirty site submissions in real time by visiting http://safeweb.norton.com/safety.
While Norton can help you detect which websites are bad, FireHost can help keep your website off the bad list. We help keep hacker activity at bay by providing application level firewall protection, proactive vulnerability monitoring, and much more as a standard part of every secure web hosting package.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
