Study: Adult Sites Safer than ‘Legitimate’ Ones
A new report released Monday contradicts the notion of pornographic sites being more virus infected than sites with other kinds of content.
“We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content, not at all, but the statistics are clear: For every infected adult domain we identify, there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected,” said Ondrej Vlcek, chief technology officer of Avast, which conducted the study.
Vlcek explained in U.K. for example, there are more infected domains containing the word “London” than any other domain containing the word “sex.”
The latest discovery of an infected site is the Vodafone U.K. website. This infection in the smartphones section is an example of how cyber crooks find ways to spread malware to the Internet users.
The infection of Vodafone is an HTML:Script-inf, an evolution of JS:illRedir and JS:ilIiframe exploits. According to Avast, this type of infection is widespread and accounts for 20 percent of all infected U.K. pages. The infection takes advantage of a two-week- old Microsoft Windows vulnerability.
“The 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 unpatched,” Vlcek said. “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.”
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