Visiting the StopBadware Database
In light of several reports lately about the amount of Malware sites that now exist, I thought I'd go thru the database at StopBadware.org and see what I could find ... 92,000 sites ... wow!
Over the last several days I visited 10,000 ... that's right 10,000 which should give a good cross-section of their database. What I found was the majority of these sites or Forums, etc have been hacked and the culprits have injected a variety of Malware ... some of them are pretty nasty, many of them (hacked sites) contain multiple exploits.
Armed with only my HOSTS file and my NOD32 Antivirus (no antispyware) on Windows Vista, I added the culprits (several hundred) to the HOSTS file as I found them. So how did I make out? Not one, let me repeat, not one exploit was able to get thru my defenses, that's pretty impressive and says a lot of the added security of Windows Vista.
Now I have to give a lot of credit to my antivirus NOD32 from eset.com, which detected a lot of Malware before the site even finished loading. Which by the way was just awarded the highest rating from av-comparatives.org. You can view the full report here (.pdf)
I've listed below the latest detections by NOD32 while I was going thru the list of reported Malware sites ... naturally these will be added to the next update of the HOSTS file.
Note: while I was tied up with this project over the last few days I may have missed sending a few of you the Update Notices for the latest HOSTS file version ... sorry about that ...