Symantec: Religious web sites more likely to be infected than pornographic ones

[Initech]

Symantec reports that religious websites are more likely to infect computers with a virus than sites serving up naughty adult material. Why? Because the latter has likely invested money into securing their sites against hacks and infections. After all, it would be bad for business if a customer looking for adult material contracted a virtual disease before the virtual action even started.

"It is interesting to note that Web sites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth," the report states on page 33. "Moreover, religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. 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."

As expected, the top five most-infected sites are blogs and web communications (19.8-percent), hosting and personal hosted sites (15.6-percent), business and economy (10-percent), shopping (7.7-percent), and finally education and reference (6.9-percent). The average number of malicious web sites identified per day in 2011 was 9,314, up from 6,051 in 2010. 61-percent of the websites found to be infected were actually "regular" web sites that have been compromised rather than sites intentionally created to serve up malware. That should say a lot about the level of security implemented within these "regular" sites.

"Drive-by attacks continue to be a challenge for consumers and businesses," the report reads. "They are responsible for hundreds of millions of attempted infections every year. Attackers keep changing their technique and they have become very sophisticated. Badly-spelled, implausible email has been replaced by techniques such as ‘clickjacking’ or ‘likejacking’ where a user visits a website to watch a tempting video and the attackers use that click to post a comment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."

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Porn-Religion-Symantec-Malware-drive-by,news-15093.html

[Seedersandleechers]

1. Maybe they pray the virus away?

[JoePhilly]

2. My in-laws are very religious, and their computer ALWAYS has a virus on it.

I had to fix their computer at least 4 times.

I really wish they liked porn more.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. They rely on faith-based security ? nt

[ForgoTheConsequence]

4. I can see why.

Religious websites are usually morally opposed to anti-virus protection.

[Initech]

5. They probably see it as the "Lord's work"