When Good Websites Gone Bad [Infographic]

“I only surf popular websites. So I don’t need to worry about malware, right?”

A recent research conducted by Baracuda Labs suggests that even popular and high-ranked websites are far from being safe to surf. In February 2012, the research team examined The Alexa Top 25,000 Most Popular Domains and found that in just a month time, over 10 million people were served exploited contents by visiting these websites. That’s about 4 victims every second! Moreover, about 58 of these infected sites are found actively serving drive-by download exploits, which open the door for hackers to access personal information found on your PC, showing that the assumption above does not always hold true.

Most of the compromised sites that served visitors malicious contents were at least one year old, and over half have been around for more than five years. This shows that hackers can easily utilise well-established websites as the platform for their drive-by download campaigns. In addition, these infected sites are spanned across 18 different countries, indicating that this problem has no geographic barrier.

These numbers should be a wake-up call for all of us to finally realise the importance of having a top-notch Anti-Malware software to protect our website and our visitors. Just like the old saying goes, it’s always better to prepare and prevent, than to repair and repent.

A comprehensive report of the research including their methodology can be found here.