In the first quarter of 2007, security firm Sophos identified 23,864 threats, up from 9,450 on this time last year.In the same period the firm said it was identifying 5,000 web pages per day infected with so-called malware.
The report was released during InfoSec, Europe's largest conference on online security issues, in London.
"With computer users becoming increasingly aware of how to protect against email-aware viruses and malware, hackers have turned to the web as their preferred vector of attack," said the report.
Sophos reported that 70% of infected websites were legitimate sites hijacked by hackers because they had not been sufficiently protected.
Visitors to websites - even legitimate sites - can protect themselves by ensuring they have up-to-date virus and anti-spyware software installed.
So the malware writers are not content with sending us sh*t.
Now they can sit back and say "come and get it".
Goodness, that makes me upset!!!
On the same token, I once attended an anti-virus seminar at my mall (pretty small group of people and some computer-wiz with a projector). He gave us the schpeal on viruses, malware, spam, trajans, the works- and in the middle of the talk he browsed Microsoft.com, a few innocent searches on Google.com, browsed a few news sites, and a few other totally legit websites (with the crowd watching on the projector). Before he began, he had completely scanned his computer and was clean- AFTER the browsing he scaned hsi computer as he wrapped up hi stalk and came up with six things of spyware- and two of them were worse than the usual small-almost-threatless-kind! It shocked me how easy it is to contract bugs online!
It just makes me angry!