AVG (AU/NZ), the distributor for Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific of the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, today unveiled the results of an AVG Technologies’ research study which shows that — contrary to popular opinion — most malicious web sites are hosted on US servers and not in other countries like China.
The AVG research study is based on the analysis of threats reported during the last 6 months from AVG’s 110 million worldwide users of its AVG LinkScanner web security product. The research indicates an increase in malware-serving web sites targeting end users, which typically focus on stealing online banking credentials, credit card information, personal identities and passwords to social sites.
The detection and analysis of exploits was based on AVG’s unique crowd-sourced methods for analysing web content for malicious or dangerous intent as reported by AVG’s vast network of LinkScanner installations worldwide. AVG’s research shows that malicious code is not just an issue with outlaw servers located in countries with weak laws and lax enforcement.
Monitoring active web servers serving exploits around the world indicates that 44 percent of the corrupted servers are hosted in the United States, followed by Germany and China at just 5 percent each. Many of these malware-serving web sites are legitimate sites compromised by hackers to serve exploits on their behalf. In total, exploitive servers were found in nearly 4,600 locations throughout the USA.
“The results of this study shatter the myth that malicious code is primarily hosted in countries where e-crime laws are less developed,” said Karel Obluk, Chief Technology Officer, AVG Technologies. “Our research shows that malicious content is much more likely to show up on web servers in the U.S. than one in Asia or Eastern Europe. This makes perfect sense since the USA is a primary target market for the criminals and has rich and mature Internet infrastructure making the threats both highly accessible and cheap to host.
Obluk continued, “Even more important to note is that, on average during this six month period, about 50 percent of the domains hosted on these servers were online and hosting threats only one day or less. This transient nature makes them very hard to find and add to traditional reputation-based protection systems in time to be helpful to users.”
