Forget Porn, How Safe is Your Digitial Music Site?
A new report from McAfee on Web site-based threats complements research by Google discussed here a couple of weeks ago. McAfee's State of Search Engine Safety measures the number of "risky" sites in terms of malware, adware, spam, and spyware threats. This is the second of the annual reports and overall, the trend is improving with 4% of search results linking to risky sites, down from 5% last year. Not surprisingly, ad links are more likely to lead to risky sites than unsponsored ("organic" in McAfee parlance) links. Here are some of the most interesting results:
- Sponsored sites are 2.4 times more likely to contain risky links than organic search results.
- Google, Ask and AOL are safer than last year, Yahoo! and MSN safety measures have declined.
- Digital music and tech toys are the worst categories with close to 1 in 5 results linking to risky sites; this is worse than porn sites with slightly less than 1 in 10 links, overall, leading to risky sites. 22.9% of sponsored adult sites, though, lead to risky sites.
- Rates vary by search engine. 29.3% of sponsored adult sites on Yahoo! lead to risky sites but only 3.7% of Ask's comparable ads lead to such sites.
When compared to Google's research on malware, which analyzed billiions of URLs, the McAfee results sound high. Google found problematic Web sites at a rate of 0.1% overall. The difference is that Google's baseline is different from McAfee's. Google looked at Web pages in general, McAfee looked at pages found in search results. Both are valid starting points, depending on what you are looking for.
Google's broad base helps us understand the state of the Web in general, McAfee's more focused population targets sites people are likely to visit.
The Security Fix and LA Times comment on the story as well.
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