{"id":20817,"date":"2018-08-17T16:18:39","date_gmt":"2018-08-17T20:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/20817\/"},"modified":"2022-05-05T03:30:49","modified_gmt":"2022-05-04T16:30:49","slug":"risky-websites-42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/20817\/","title":{"rendered":"How risky is the Internet? Researchers say 42%"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you visit a website, you can open your computer to a lot more danger than you might think. All sites load their own content, some load ads served by an ad network, some load content served by other sites, and some load services hosted by other sites. Often, you\u2019re receiving a pretty motley assortment of visible and invisible code.<\/p>\n

Sounds like something you need to worry about only on shady or small sites, right? Wrong: A recent analysis by Menlo Security<\/a> of the world\u2019s most-visited websites shows nearly half still leave visitors open to vulnerable software, too much active content, and large amounts of code execution \u2014 in other words, a lot of potential danger. Ultimately, the researchers deemed 42% of the Alexa Top 100,000 \u201crisky.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sites trusting other sites<\/h3>\n

The reasons also included a bunch of things users can\u2019t control at all \u2014 unpatched server software, previous known malware infestation, a past security breach, and the like. Beyond the visited site, the findings revealed that each site calls an average of 25 background sites to fetch various types of content.<\/p>\n

That means that when you\u2019re visiting a website you presumably trust, you\u2019re actually dealing with dozens of sites, most of which you never even heard of.<\/p>\n

\"When<\/a>

When you visit a site, you\u2019re also visiting every site that site visits. Sound familiar?<\/p><\/div>\n

The active content risks had a pretty wide range, but even the best hovered around 20%. That\u2019s one in five top sites \u2014 bad odds for the site visitor trying to get away clean. By the way, in addition to videos and other related items, \u201cactive content\u201d also includes lots of the stuff that makes a website more appealing and useful to visitors, such as dynamically updated, personalized information on weather, news, stocks, and so forth. It may appear courtesy of JavaScript<\/a> and Flash, too \u2014 programming often justifiably vilified for its vulnerabilities, a problem compounded by site owners\u2019 failure to update.<\/p>\n

Websites serving content from other sources introduces a degree of risk, but that risk became much more significant once cybercriminals realized they could actually target those sources and make them distribute malware. Your favorite news site might be upright and security-minded, but are all of its providers?<\/p>\n

Vulnerable Web software<\/h3>\n

The report also states that many of the world\u2019s most popular websites don\u2019t have to worry about their partners letting them down; they take care of that part just fine \u2014 by using outdated servers. Some hadn\u2019t been updated in years or even decades. Such sites are extremely vulnerable to malware and breaches, which in turn puts their visitors at risk.<\/p>\n

\"Web<\/a>

Web software that isn\u2019t updated can be weaponized<\/p><\/div>\n

If last year\u2019s WannaCry outbreak taught the world anything, it\u2019s that updating software in time is important. Or did it?<\/p>\n

Stay safe<\/h3>\n

Ultimately, you cannot trust a website just because it\u2019s popular, or slick, or well-established. At the same time, you can\u2019t compel site owners and administrators to look out for their visitors, so stay alert, disable Flash in your browsers and maybe JavaScript too if you\u2019re extremely cautious \u2014 however, some websites won\u2019t be working without JavaScript. Better yet, install a strong security solution<\/a> and set it to update itself automatically. Kaspersky Internet Security keeps you safe by checking the websites you visit, scanning the files you download, and applying world-leading detection and protection against anything a rogue website (or its content servers) might try to foist on you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Almost half of the most-visited websites open visitors to potential dangers. What can you do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2706,"featured_media":20818,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2646],"tags":[1134,36,422,268,2963,399],"class_list":{"0":"post-20817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-threats","9":"tag-internet","10":"tag-malware-2","11":"tag-threats","12":"tag-vulnerabilities","13":"tag-web-security","14":"tag-websites"},"hreflang":[{"hreflang":"en-au","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/20817\/"},{"hreflang":"en-in","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.in\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/13947\/"},{"hreflang":"en-ae","url":"https:\/\/me-en.kaspersky.com\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/11646\/"},{"hreflang":"en-us","url":"https:\/\/usa.kaspersky.com\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/15946\/"},{"hreflang":"en-gb","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.uk\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/14233\/"},{"hreflang":"es-mx","url":"https:\/\/latam.kaspersky.com\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/13313\/"},{"hreflang":"es","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.es\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/16736\/"},{"hreflang":"it","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.it\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/16141\/"},{"hreflang":"ru","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.ru\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/21110\/"},{"hreflang":"tr","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.tr\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/5234\/"},{"hreflang":"x-default","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/23502\/"},{"hreflang":"fr","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.fr\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/10845\/"},{"hreflang":"pt-br","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.br\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/10846\/"},{"hreflang":"pl","url":"https:\/\/plblog.kaspersky.com\/risky-websites-42\/9625\/"},{"hreflang":"de","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.de\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/17490\/"},{"hreflang":"zh","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.cn\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/9901\/"},{"hreflang":"ja","url":"https:\/\/blog.kaspersky.co.jp\/risky-websites-42\/21279\/"},{"hreflang":"ru-kz","url":"https:\/\/blog.kaspersky.kz\/risky-websites-42\/17156\/"},{"hreflang":"en-za","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/risky-websites-42\/20818\/"}],"acf":[],"banners":"","maintag":{"url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/tag\/websites\/","name":"websites"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20817"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24002,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20817\/revisions\/24002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}