Monday, March 7, 2011 The Dasient Q4 Malware Update: Significant Rise in Malvertising Attacks, Social Networking Sites Easy Distribution Platforms for Malware Q4 2010 was a quarter in which we saw continued growth of web malware and malvertising attacks targeting legitimate sites. In this report, we focus on (1) quantitative measurements around web malware and malvertising, (2) analysis surrounding the most significant attacker domains for the quarter, and (3) results from some experiments we conducted on the potential impact that web malware could have on social media networks.THE Q4 HIGHLIGHTS WERE:
Malvertising is on a significant rise, having doubled from Q3 to Q4 2010. Based on our Q4 estimates, three (3) million malvertising impressions were served per day, an increase of 100% as compared to 1.5 million malvertising impressions per day in Q3 2010. The increase in the estimate from the previous quarter comes from a growth in malvertising incidents from networks monitored last quarter, plus malvertising incidents from additional “remnant” ad networks that we started monitoring in Q4.
More than one million web sites were estimated to be infected in Q4 2010. As compared to data from one year prior (Q4 2009), web malware infections have nearly doubled and are a growing threat that needs to be abated.
The probability that an average Internet user will hit an infected page after three months of web browising is 95%.
The top attacker domain was ipq.com, a free DNS forwarding service. Cybercriminals are abusing DNS forwarding services in an effort to hide and reduce the cost of executing their attacks.
We found that most social media networks are prone to being used as distribution platforms for malware. We conducted some safe, benign experiments on various social networking sites, and found that infections can occur relatively easily through them via user-generated-content (UGC) interactions and advertisements.
more on link
http://blog.dasient.com/2011/03/dasient-q4-malware-update-significant.html