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Google warns of 'drive by downloads'
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by mtippett | February 17, 2008 at 01:21 am
1036 views | 2 Recommendations | 2 comments
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The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers
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at 05:28 on February 17th, 2008
mtippett, I like this story. It's good stuff.
Downloads are to scan how ? anybody who knows this ?
at 08:19 on February 17th, 2008
Basically, websites are controlled by code (lots and lots of it), and that code can be hacked to redirect traffic to a sort of secondary, invisible server, which then carries out an attack on the visiting machine.
The most important part of the article above is that these attacks don't necessarily come from "dodgy" sites: there's an erroneous assumption that only porn/gambling/illegal sites can actually be dangerous to your system, but that has never really been the case.