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It's a well-known Internet fact that many an adult website is riddled with harmful viruses or malware, right? Maybe not.
Tucked within Symantec's recent state of the Internet report was this interesting nugget: religious and ideological websites have "triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites."
Why? Symantec suggested a very practical reason.
"We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it's not good for repeat business," the company said.
Symantec didn't go into detail about what it considered to be a religious or ideological website. Overall, the company identified 403 million unique malware variants in 2011, while the number of Web attacks that were blocked on a daily basis jumped 36 percent.
On its list of most dangerous website categories, blogs/Web communications landed at No. 1 with 19.8 percent being infected. That was followed by hosting/personal hosted sites (15.6 percent), business/economy (10 percent), shopping (7.7 percent), and education/reference (6.9 percent). Porn landed at No. 10 with 2.4 percent.
Evidence suggests that scammers are getting a bit more sophisticated, too. "Badly-spelled, implausible email has been replaced by techniques such as 'clickjacking' or 'likejacking' where a user visits a website to watch a tempting video and the attackers use that click to post a comment to all the user's friends on Facebook, thereby enticing them to click on the same malicious link," Symantec said.
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