Research: 1.3 Million Malicious Ads Viewed Daily

The true extent of the malvertizing scourge became much clearer this week with the release of new research by Dasient which shows that about 1.3 million malicious ads are being viewed online everyday, most pushing drive-by downloads and fake security software.

Dancho Danchev sums up the findings from the research:

•The probability of a user getting infected from a malvertisement is twice as likely on a weekend and the average lifetime of a malvertisement is 7.3 days.

•97% of Fortune 500 web sites are at a high risk of getting infected with malware due to external partners (such as javascript widget providers, ad networks, and/or packaged software providers).

•Fortune 500 web sites have such a high risk because 69% of them use external Javascript to render portions of their sites and 64% of them are running outdated web applications.

Malicious ad attacks targeting high-profile websites have been on the rise recently with the New York Times and Gawker media among the victims.

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