Cisco Annual Security Report: Threats Step Out of the Shadows
From the post:
Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person’s online activity becomes shadier, findings from Cisco’s 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats do not target pornography, pharmaceutical or gambling sites as much as they do legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences, such as major search engines, retail sites and social media outlets. In fact, Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site. Viewing online advertisements? Advertisements are 182 as times likely to deliver malicious content than pornography. (emphasis added)
Numbers like this make me wonder: Is anyone indexing ads?
Or better yet, creating a topic map that maps back to the creators/origins of ad content?
That has the potential to be a useful service, unlike porn blocking ones.
Legitimate brands would have an incentive to stop malware in their ads, origins of malware ads would be exposed (blocked?).
I first saw this at Quick Links by Greg Linden.