PRAGUE, Czech Republic—A new study by anti-virus software maker Avast has determined that mainstream sites are far more likely to contain malicious viruses than adult websites, by a margin of 100 to 1.
"We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content, not at all," said CTO Ondrej Vlcek, in an announcement posted to the company website, "but the statistics are clear—for every infected adult domain we identify there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected.”
Avast claims that the bad guys are outpacing the ability of mainstream IT managers to secure their networks, and points to the fact that they see more infected domains that contain the word “London” than adult ones containing the word “sex.”
The company also speaks to the infection of Vodaphone, which they claim was still present as of June 28, and which represents a type of infection that “accounts for 20 percent of all infected UK pages.”
According to Vlcek, “The [Vodaphone] problem is particularly bad because the CVE-2010-1885 vulnerability targets the most widely used version of Windows, and at the present time it is still un-patched. This means that even if a user is running a fully updated Windows XP SP3 with all the security patches, the user is still vulnerable.”
The media announcement can be found at http://www.avast.com/pr-legitimate-websites-outscore-the-adult.
