200,000 sites spreading web malware, China’s hosting the most

Yesterday, the Stopbadware.org initiative released a report entitled “May 2008 Badware Websites Report” summarizing the findings out of analyzing over 200,000 sites spreading malware. With recent data for malicious sites provided by Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic, Stopbadware.org also received responses from affected parties such as Google itself, The Planet, SoftLayer and iEurop. Here are more details on the methodology used, and who’s who in hosting the most badware sites for May, 2008 :

Using data from Google’s Safe Browsing initiative, StopBadware.org analyzed over 200,000 websites found to engage in badware behavior. The analysis found that over half of the sites were based on Chinese network blocks, with a small number of blocks accounting for most of the infected sites in that country. The U.S. accounted for 21% of infected sites, and these were spread across a wide range of networks. Compared to last year, the total number of sites was much higher, likely due both to increased scanning efforts by Google and to increased use of websites as a vector of malware infection. Several U.S.-based network blocks that were heavily infected last year, including that of web hosting company iPowerWeb, whose network block topped last year’s list, no longer host large numbers of infected sites.

To read the whole article, see here.

-Ken