Symantec: More Malware on Religious Sites Than Porn Sites

According to Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report, religious and ideological Web sites have far more security threats per infected site than adult/pornographic Web sites.

“We hypothesize that this is because pornographic Web site owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interested in keeping their sites malware-free — it’s not good for repeat business,” the report states.

“Pornography-themed Web sites have long had a reputation as the ‘dark alleyways’ of the Internet,” writes Threatpost’s Paul Roberts. “In fact, porn sites ranked tenth in the list of the top ten categories of Web sites that are most infected, after automotive themed sites (ranked 8th) and health and medicine sites (ranked 9th). Top on that list: blogs and Web communications, including religious Web sites. That was followed by personally hosted sites, business sites, shopping and education.”

“The average number of threats found on religious sites was 115 (mostly fake antivirus software),” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Rooney. “By contrast, pornographic sites had less than a quarter, at around 25 threats per site. Of course, the number of pornographic sites is vastly greater than religious sites.”

“Symantec measured an increase of more than 81 percent in malware in 2011 over 2010, while the number of malware variants increased by 41 percent,” writes PCWorld’s Daniel Ionescu. “On the flip side, spam volumes have decreased from 88.5 percent of all email in 2010 to 75.1 percent in 2011 — thanks to law enforcement action which shut down the Rustock worldwide botnet that was responsible for sending out large amounts of spam.”