According to a study released on Tuesday, your computer is more likely to get infected by a virus from visiting a religious website that a porn site.
In its Internet Security Threat Report, the anti-virus vendor Symantec said that these “drive-by attacks” are the leading cause of computer viruses. Essentially, hackers set a trap on legitimate website by laying down malicious code so that when an unwary computer reads them, the virus launches.
According to the report, religious websites, or websites which contained ideological themes were found to have three times the average number of “threats” than those containing adult content.
Symantec went on to note how interesting it was that:
Websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth…. We hypothesize that this is because
pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it’s not good for repeat business.”
The report’s insights were derived from internet data gathered last year by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which monitors cyber-attacks in more than 200 countries. Not only does Symantec monitor these types of attacks but it actively combats them. The company boasted that it had blocked 5.5 billion attacks in 2011 which was an 81% increase in attacks from 2010.
Lastly, Symantec also reported on the surge in hacks aimed at smartphone and tablet users as well as company and government employees.
