Google Identifies 9,500 New Malicious Sites Every Day

The scale of the online security threat has been made clear after Google released statistics revealing it identifies and flags roughly 9,500 new malicious sites every day.

The statistics come from the company’s Safe Browsing initiative, which it started five years ago to combat malicious content on the Web. At the time, the primary goal was to safeguard Google’s search engine results against malware and phishing, as well as educating webmasters on security, explained Niels Provos, a member of Google’s security team.

Red Warnings

“We protect 600 million users through built-in protection for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, where we show several million security warnings every day to Internet users,” he blogged. “When we detect malware or phishing, we trigger a red warning screen that discourages clicking through to the website. Our free and public Safe Browsing API allows other organisations to keep their users safe by using the data we’ve compiled.”

The 9,500 new malicious sites Google identifies each day are either legitimate sites that have been compromised by attackers, or malicious sites created intentionally to spread malware. Online commerce sites are a favourite of phishers, who as a group are getting more creative, he noted. Phishers move fast to try to stay ahead of anti-fraud efforts, with some phishers remaining online for less than an hour to avoid detection.

Attackers who compromise legitimate sites will often try to redirect users to an attack site and strike users with drive-by downloads that launch malware programs of Web surfers without their knowledge.

“To try to avoid detection, these attack sites adopt several techniques, such as rapidly changing their Internet location with free web hosting services and auto-generated domain names,” Provos explained. “Although less common than drive-by downloads, we’re also seeing more malware authors bypassing software vulnerabilities altogether and instead employing methods to try to trick users into installing malicious software – for example, fake anti-virus software.”

Constant Lookout

“Approximately 12-14 million Google Search queries per day warn users about current malware threats, and we provide malware warnings for about 300,000 downloads per day through our download protection service for Chrome,” he added.

Just recently, Google announced it would send warnings to Gmail users if the company believes they are being targeted by state-sponsored cyber-attacks aimed at stealing personal information or blocking email message streams.

“We are constantly on the lookout for malicious activity on our systems, in particular attempts by third parties to log into users’ accounts unauthorised,” Eric Grosse, Google’s vice president of security engineering, explained in a blog post. “When we have specific intelligence – either directly from users or from our own monitoring efforts – we show clear warning signs and put in place extra roadblocks to thwart these bad actors.”

Do you know Google’s secrets? To find out, take our quiz!