There was an average growth of 225 per cent in malicious websites in the second half of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. Also,hackers replaced their traditional 'scattergun' approach with focused efforts on web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages. The findings,released by Websense Security Labs here recently,point out that over six months,Search Engine Optimisation poisoning attacks featured heavily and the research identified 13.7 per cent searches for trending news/buzz words lead to malware. "Attackers continued to capitalise on web site reputation and exploiting user trust,with 71 per cent of web sites with malicious code revealed to be legitimate sites that had been compromised," said the study. A slight (3.3 per cent) decline in the growth of the number of web sites compromised was also observed. Further,it said that 58 per cent of data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web and 85.8 per cent of all emails were spam.
