Web browsing and searching are becoming increasingly risky activities, according to a report recently published by Google. "In the past few months, more than 1% of all search results contained at least one result that we believe to point to malicious content and the trend seems to be increasing," said Niels Provos, a security engineer at Google.
Provos said that in the year and a half since Google began tracking malicious Web pages, the company has found more than 3 million unique URLs on more than 180,000 web sites that attempt to install malware on visitors' computers.
A white paper co-authored by a Google technician and two Johns Hopkins University computer scientists describes the increasing impact of "drive-by downloads," the exploitation of web browser vulnerabilities to download and run malware automatically on the computers of web site visitors.
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