Antivirus firm names ‘dirtiest’ websites
MANILA, Philippines - A software security company and its online community of online threat hunters have identified 100 of the “dirtiest” websites – almost half of which contain “adult” material.
Nearly half of the identified websites also contained up to 20,000 types of threats, such as viruses, browser exploits and worms.
Other websites, on the other hand, only have around 20 or so threats.
Symantec listed the dirtiest websites in its Norton Safe Web site (http://safeweb.norton.com). The list of dirtiest websites featured those that contained various topics from animal hunting, sports activities, legal services, and gadgets.
Symantec’s Norton Safe Web service crawled through the Internet to analyze the contents of various websites. Members of its online anti-threat community also helped in identifying certain websites.
The number of dirty websites has also grown in the past few years as cybercriminals are finding ways to reduce detection, which includes embedding malicious codes in websites that are not easily detectable with antivirus software.
Asian countries with large populations of Internet users are also under threat by cybercriminals as more Asians go online, according to David Freer, vice president of Symantec Asia Pacific’s consumer business unit.
