That, my friends, is the message being touted by the latest Security Threat report to emerge from Sophos which says that one web page was infected every five seconds (count them) during the first half of 2008.
Last year it was only, and I feel bad enough saying only, one every 14 seconds.
To put it into some kind of perspective, every day of the first six months of this year Sophos has detected 16,173 malicious web pages. The vast majority, around 90 percent we are told, thanks to those sites being hacked. The main culprit being that old favourite the SQL Injection exploit.
Sophos consultant Graham Cluley told IT Pro that “There’s been a concerted campaign to infect people,” said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley. “If you were to paint a picture of what the first six months of 2008 were all about when it came to malware, it was about SQL injections hitting websites.”
Sophos has identified that the number one host for malware on the web is Blogger (Blogspot.com), which allows computer users to make their own websites easily at no charge. Hackers both set up malicious blogs on the service, and inject dangerous web links and content into innocent blogs in the form of comments. Blogspot.com accounts for 2 percent of all of the world's malware hosted on the web according to Sophos.