Zscaler: 10% of sites are malicious, another 10% suspicious
How many websites on the Internet are malicious? How many of them aren't? While we'll never get exact numbers, one estimate says that almost 1 in 10 are malicious, while approximately 1 in 10 of them are suspicious.
So, where did those numbers come from? Zscaler developed a tool called Zulu, which runs the following tests on any URL you choose: External elements, Content checks, URL checks, and Host checks. It then gives a final security rating out of a score from 0 to 100. Between 0 and 49 is rated as Benign, between 50 and 74 is marked Suspicious, and between 75 and 100 is classified as Malicious.
Zscaler ran 27,000 website URLs through its tool to give you an idea of the security for the broader Web. 81 percent of sites were found to be Benign, 9.5 percent were found to be Suspicious, and another 9.5 percent were considered to be Malicious.
These numbers will of course vary based on the sample of websites chosen. I would say 27,000 is a decent size to test given there is no way to run the test on every single URL out there. I would assume Zscaler will keep us posted as more of users test their sites as well as others they stumble on.
I ran the tool on zdnet.com. The cool thing is that after Zulu runs once, you can share the results with anyone without having to run the tool again: report. As you can see in the screenshot above, ZDNet scored 13/100, giving it a Benign classification. On the flipside, sites change, so I would assume reports such as this one will expire.
Run Zulu on your website and let me know how it fares. It's not exactly the most accurate tool, but it gives you a good idea as to what you may want to fix.
See also:
- 3 million bank accounts hacked in Iran
- Up to 1.5 million Visa, MasterCard credit card numbers stolen
- Chinese hacker arrested for leaking 6 million logins
- Anti-abortion hacker jailed for stealing 10,000 records
- Medicaid hack update: 500,000 records and 280,000 SSNs stolen
- Hacktivists stole 100 million records in 2011