China hosts nearly half of malware sites

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China–including Hong Kong–hosted 44.8 percent of the world’s infected sites in August 2007. Sophos said that it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August.

Why is this important? The web is becoming a much less safe place for the average web surfer… and there are few solutions in the pipeline - except common sense and a lot of luck!

The United States ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of Web sites that contain malicious code.The number of infected Web pages has also grown. “Hackers are hijacking Web sites around the world to make them point to malware on sites based in China, the United States and Russia. Cybercriminals don’t discriminate when it comes to targeting the Web,” she added.Sophos also warned against a sharp rise in spam pointing people to these infected sites. Malicious senders, in an attempt to bypass attachment virus scanners, are using messages that direct users to Web sites with malicious code. Computers get infected when users click on the links in the e-mail message.”Most malware writers…are using spam and the Web to infect users,” said Theriault. “Criminals are hard at work trying to slip past filters at the corporate gateway.”By Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia - see original article here.