Posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
According to Dasient, some 1.3 million malicious advertisements are viewed on the Web everyday, with each having an average life of between seven and eight days. The company, which helps ad networks and publishers deal with the issue, collected the data from its telemetry system. Perhaps just as interesting, Dasient found users are twice as likely to be infected by a malicious ad during the weekend as they are during the week. Most of the time, 59 percent, malicious ads infect users with malware via drive-by downloads, according to Dasient. The rest of the time (41 percent) attackers are pushing rogue anti-virus. This is backed up in part by research from Google (PDF), which found rogue anti-virus was responsible for 50 percent of malware delivered by online ads.
