China Hosts Majority of Badware Sites
Posted by Maxim Weinstein Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:20:00 GMT
StopBadware.org today released a report analyzing over 200,000 sites reported by Google as exhibiting badware behavior.
See the press release and/or the report for more information.
We attempted to contact the owners of the top 10 infected network blocks identified in the report. Note that a network block owner may or may not have control over the content of sites hosted on that block. Here’s what we heard from the companies we reached:
Google:
We take malware blogs very seriously. On a daily basis, malware blogs are created by bad guys, and subsequently detected and deleted by Google. The 4,261 figure represents some of the malware blogs we delete over a 30 day period.
Because we’re very aggressive and very proactive in preventing and detecting harmful content placed on our services, the Blogger numbers are disproportionately higher than they would be on non-Google properties.
Given that there are millions of active blogs in our network, 4,261 is just a very small percentage of the total blogs.
With our aggressive approach, malware blogs, like spam blogs, tend to have short lifespans. WRT to the impact on users, if an existing popular site that gets millions of page views per day gets compromised for a few hours, that represents a huge number of infections compared to one of these blogs.
The Planet:
The Planet provides dedicated, self-managed hosting services to our 22,000 customers, which means they maintain full control of their servers. Many of our customers are resellers, and they lease space on their servers – sometimes to as many as 200 companies per box – to their clients.
Nonetheless, we have an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that precludes customers from distributing malware of any kind. Once we are aware of any inappropriate use of our servers, our Abuse Department initiates an investigation. If we identify issues, we proactively work with customers so they meet our AUP.
SoftLayer:
SoftLayer Technologies is a provider of data center services centered around the delivery of on-demand server infrastructure. We do not manage the content or applications hosted from our infrastructure as this is the direct responsibility of our customers, many of which are in fact hosting resellers. Having said that, we also have a very strict acceptable use policy which you can find here: http://www.softlayer.com/legal.html.
We try to be as proactive as possible in eliminating any and all content from our network that breaches the terms of this policy. But, as I am sure you are aware, this is not always an easy task.
I have forwarded your email to our abuse department so that they can start investigating the findings you have suggested below. We will take all necessary actions to remove any malicious material from our network so that we can better serve our customers and the entire Internet community.
iEurop:
Of course we’re interesed in any tool that helps us protecting internet users.
If you can send us any info regarding malware hosted on our machines we’ll be more than happy to remove those websites …
