Malvertising attacks surge

Malvertising is on a significant rise, having doubled from Q3 to Q4 2010, according to Dasient.

Based on Q4 estimates, three 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 Dasient 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 browsing is 95%.

The top attacker domain was ipq.co, a free DNS forwarding service. Cybercriminals are abusing DNS forwarding services in an effort to hide and reduce the cost of executing their attacks.

Dasient found that most social media networks are prone to being used as distribution platforms for malware. They 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.