The ghost in your browser

A   survey by Google has discovered more than one million websites that contain Malware. This hidden software is capable of stealing your personal information and spreading computer viruses. By browsing the internet, a user can unknowingly be the victim of what the Google Anti-Malware Team calls a “drive-by download”. It may be the case that the owners of the websites that infect your system are themselves not aware of the presence of the surreptitious software. The goal of the attacking software is to insert a piece of HTML code into the website, which then tests the vulnerability of each visitor's applications.

In the year since it was created, the Google team has investigated 12 million sites and discovered one million with Malware. The majority of these are based in the US, Germany, China and Russia. The findings were reported on Google's newly-launched Online Security Blog, another sign of the company's growing concern over the threat posed by the proliferation of malware and the compromised sites that distribute it.

Advice for users includes enabling automatic updates for your operating system, your browsers, browser plugins and other applications. Automatic updates ensure that your computer receives the latest security patches as they are published. Google also recommends that you run an anti-virus engine that checks network traffic and files on your computer for known Malware and abnormal behaviour.

More information at http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com