You’ve been warned that visiting web sites can be dangerous, but have you ever wondered how serious the risk is? Google checks web pages, when cataloging them, to see if they contain malware – malicious code that can take advantage of vulnerabilities in web browsers or plug-ins, such as Flash and QuickTime. Their latest published results show that more than three million unique URLs on over 180,000 web sites attempt to install malware. That’s more than 1% of web sites they catalogue!
Naturally, you won’t encounter evil web pages on mainstream web sites – those of Google, Yahoo!, major news outlets, etc. – but you may find them on middle-of-the-road web sites, where malware can be injected into web pages by third-party content, including ads. When this occurs, the web sites themselves are generally unwitting vectors of this malware; they may be hacked, as Google found that more than 38% of Apache (popular web server software) and PHP (used to create dynamic pages) are out of date. Since these programs issue regular updates when security vulnerabilities are discovered, web hosts that don’t update them are putting their visitors at risk.
There’s not many “safe browsing” techniques you can use – unlike when you know not to go into a bad neighborhood in a city, dangerous web sites can be just a click away, and once you load a page it may be too late. So you need proactive security, such as Intego NetBarrier, which protects your Mac from the dangers of the Internet. You should also make sure that you apply all of Apple’s security updates, which can patch vulnerabilities in software such as QuickTime, which has seen many such issues in recent months.
