200,000 sites spreading web malware, China's hosting the most | ZDNet
Summary
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. Whats important to take into consideration when going through these stats, is that a great deal of networks hosting domain portfolios engaging in a countless number of malicious activities, would remain underreported due to the efforts them put into evading common detection approaches, the result of which is their current placement in the "Unknown" and "Other" categories. I was pleasantly surprised to see SoftLayer mentioned, in fact SoftLayers response to the research at the first place, as if we are to play a game of associations the first things that come to my mind when I see SoftLayer are The Russian Business Network, InterCage, Inc., Layered Technologies, Inc., Ukrtelegroup Ltd, Turkey Abdallah Internet Hizmetleri, and Hostfresh, ISPs providing infrastructure to malware command and control interfaces and malicious domains used in the majority of malware embedded attacks during the entire 2007, and early 2008. The report makes an important point, namely, that compared to the previous year the total number of sites found to engage in badware activities was much bigger, mostly because of the increasing use of sites as infection vectors, but also because of Googles increased scanning efforts. The doorway would serve legitimate content to a potentially identified search engines crawler or even a client side honeypot, but would reveal its real ugliness to the average Internet user.