Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Hackers Galore: 57,000 New Malware Sites Weekly

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No one can accuse hackers of being lazy: a veritable avalanche of new malware sites springs up each and every week. Surfing the Web has never been more fraught with danger.


Malware syndicates are constructing 57,000-plus new malicious websites each week to rip off Internet users and spread even more malicious code, according to a new study conducted by security software vendor Panda Security.

eBay, Western Union and Visa are the three most-targeted companies, accounting for more than half of all the bogus websites created during the three-month investigation.

There are several machinations of the scam, but all of them have the same goal: confusing or tricking people into believing they’re visiting a legitimate site, extracting their passwords and banking or credit card numbers, and then quickly using this information to steal cash or use the account details to purchase other goods and services.

Sometimes victims are directed to the faux websites through links embedded in spam. Other times they appear after hackers have gamed search engine queries. Still others are stumbled upon when users accidentally mistype the URL for a legitimate bank or ecommerce site.

“Although search engines are making an effort to mitigate the situation by changing indexing algorithms, they have so far been unable to offset the avalanche of new websites being created by hackers every day,” Luis Corrons, PandaLabs’ technical director, said in the report.

Read the rest at eSecurity Planet.

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