Most Popular Internet Sites Consistently Serving Up Malware

Some of the Internet's oldest and most popular websites are being used to deliver malware, a new study says.

According to a new malware report issued last week by Barracuda Labs, 58 of the sites listed among Alexa's top 25,000 most popular websites are delivering drive-by downloads of malicious code, potentially affecting millions of users each day.

"Alexa top-ranked domains served malicious content 23 (or 79 percent) of the days in February," the report says." That means this problem is not isolated and occurs on a continuous, regular basis."

While some users believe that older, more established sites are safer than their newer counterparts, Barracuda's research disproved this idea.

"Over 97 percent of sites that served visitors malicious content were at least one year old; over half were on sites more than five years old," the study says. "That means attackers use well-established, long-lived Websites for their drive-by download campaigns."

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