New Malware Page Every Five Seconds: Sophos

Sophos released its Q1 2008 threat report today, and the news ain't good. In fact, it's three times as bad as last year -- that's how fast the threats are increasing. And increasing every five seconds.The Sophos first quarter report showed a new malware-infested Web page being created every five seconds -- a three-fold increase over last year.

More than half of those pages, according to Sophos, are hosted in the United States, with a stunning 79 percent of the pages belonging to legitimate business sites.

Reflecting the mal-page trend, and the effectiveness of links on those pages to steer users to their traps, Sophos found that crooks used 40 percent fewer e-mail attachments than last year.

Back in the dear old days of print magazines -- remember them? -- Liberty used to print the number of words an article contained, along with the approximate reading time for the piece.

This blog entry has 225 or so words. Say you linger over every one of them, and it takes a minute for you to read it. That's twelve more infected pages.

An hour from now another 720.

By the time this time tomorrow gets here there will be 17,280 more.

What a dangerous difference a day makes!

The complete Sophos Q1 Security threat Report can be downloaded here.