Posted 10/27/09 at 07:17:40 PM by Jason Barry

Security firm Dasient has compiled some interesting numbers regarding the slums of the internet, in particular the number of pages hosting malware. Combined with numbers released earlier this year by Microsoft and Google it leads to a disturbing and messy forecast.

According to the study an estimated 5.8 million pages within 640,000 websites were infected with code designed to impregnate visitors’’ computers with malware. Microsoft released numbers back in April regarding this same statistic claiming only 3 million pages were infected. In approximately 6 to 7 months, the internet garbage pile has close to doubled. During a similar period, Google doubled its blocked site metric to just fewer than 350,000.

The cleaning process isn’t easy because sites are getting re-infected just as quickly as they are getting clean. In fact, 39.6 percent of compromised sites have been compromised in the past and were cleaned up.

Old versions of common programs such as Adobe Flash and Acrobat provide easy targets for exploiting large numbers of clients all at once. "Hackers are starting to see some success from these attacks and whenever they see success, they continue to invest more," said Ameet Ranadive co-founder of Dasient.

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