The worldwide web is a very useful place, particularly in our business.
It is also a very dangerous place for your computer.
Now, we all know not to web-surf in dangerous waters.
But who would have thought that danger could lurk in an innocent website.
We all know there are risks out there when you surf the internet.
There are 32-billion spam messages sent per day.
40% of them are for drugs.
There are 403 million kinds of malware that can attack your computer today.
1 out of every 239 emails contains a virus.
A lot of the attackers have moved away from spam and onto the social network sites, and other kinds of attacks. So it’s not that the attackers have gone away, it’s that they’re trying other kinds of techniques.
And now the virus protection company Symantec has compiled a list of websites that are most likely to give you trouble, or pass on a virus.
And the list may surprise you.
You don’t need to go to the dark side of the web to get infected. You can just be visiting religious websites, ideological websites, literary websites that have been infected and the attackers are using them to host their malware.
That’s right, there are more viruses attached to religious websites than adult ones.
And the most common virus is fake anti-virus installation to fight…you guessed it, a virus installed by the attacker.
Think of a fireman who starts fires to keep himself employed.
So the key is, keep your real anti-virus updated.
By the way, businesses are particularly good and juicy targets for these sorts of attacks.
And it’s split roughly even between large and small companies.
And the country where more hackers and spammers are based than any other?
Pakistan.