The big boys have weighed in and both the Cisco’s 2014 Security Report and the Websense 2014 Threat Report have identified a major contributor to cyber-crime: hacked legitimate websites. The Cisco report accurately refers to these attacks as High Efficiency Infection Strategies because as the image below illustrates, a single website can attack a variety of devices. Websense re-affirms the popularity of this attack method by pointing out that 85% of malicious links are hosted on hacked legitimate websites.
Websites can launch attacks upon multiple device types ‘s (image from Cisco’s 2014 Security Report)
At 6Scan we see the magnitude of the effort behind these attacks and the damage they can inflict. There is a constant barrage of malicious traffic against the sites we secure. Why? Because using hacked websites to disseminate malware is a high-efficiency infection strategy. A compromised web site, or web server, is the bad guys’ honeypot — it’s out there just waiting for victims to show up. Many new customers come to us after they have been targeted. Once breached, these sites become platforms for serving malware until inevitably they are blacklisted by browsers or desktop anti-virus.
In many cases these small businesses have much more to lose than bigger companies. Large firms have insurance, recovery strategies and adequate resources to survive a breach, even one that is large scale and highly visible. Smaller firms, The Fortune 15 Million, don’t always have this cushion. In many cases they stand to lose everything. This is why 6Scan offers a free service to assess website security. It’s also why we focus on fixing vulnerabilities before they become breaches.
Stay safe.