A new infected website every five seconds

That's the findings this week from online security specialists Sophos, who say their filters are detecting an alarming rise in the number of infected web pages in the first quarter of 2008, another indication that cyber criminals have set up shop virtually across the web.

Sophos says its filters blocked, on average, an infected website every five seconds -- up from one infected web site every 14 seconds a year ago. The top three culprits are the US, China and Russia, which account for more than 82 per cent of all web-based malware hosted online.

Last week Sophos published a new quarterly report on the growing problem of spam as well. Sophos says that every day it now finds 23,300 spam-related web pages, a favoured trick for fraudsters hoping to dupe unsuspecting computer users out of their passwords and personal details. At that rate, Sophos calculates, a new bogus spam site appears online almost every three seconds.

And what about spam e-mail volumes? Unsolicited messages for sex aids, get-rich-quick schemes or fraudulent bank warnings now measure about 92 per cent of all mail messages, Sophos says. It's yet another reminder that the various anti-spam laws passed just a few years ago are failing miserably at stopping spam at its source.

Comments

[Simon]

I get really pi**ed off with advertising / spam emails. With my email, I can block up to 500 email addresses but they were used up ages ago and I still get 20+ per day of rubbish. When is this going to be sorted? We have the technology to read number plates from a satelite but we can stop junk mails .....???

[steve tea]

Laws are not the answer for SPAM, the Tier1 providers have to block the traffic from suspected subnets.

[Henry]

Doesn't this have to be balanced against the hugely increasing number of websites? Most websites are still safe - especially the kind we ordinarily surf to. Also using Gmail, Firefox, and safer operating systems like Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) minimises any risk and hassle.

[Pedant (Oxford)]

SIMON: "We have the technology to read number plates from a satelite"

My back-of-an-envelope calculations indicate that if the number plate was on the top of the car, and atmospheric fluctuations are ignored, a satelite in Low Earth Orbit (160km) would require a lens of over 5m diameter to achieve that kind of resolution. The Hubble telescope has a 2.4m mirror.

In short, all technology has limitations.