By infiltrating a criminal computer network aimed at infecting visitors to legitimate websites, university researchers have gained firsthand insight into the scale and scope of so-called "drive-by downloading." They found more than 6,500 websites hosting malicious code that redirected nearly 340,000 visitors to malicious sites.
Drive-by downloading involves hacking into a legitimate site to covertly install malicious software on visitors' machines or redirect them to another site.
In an unpublished paper, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara describe a four-month study in which they connected their servers to a collection of compromised computers known as the Mebroot botnet.
Comments