Security firm ScanSafe claims that Web 2.0 sites are increasingly being targeted by malware authors, because of their growing popularity and reliance on the browser.
The company says it saw an increase in the number of attacks specifically on the browser, and claims that "up to" one in 600 pages on social networking sites contain malware. Of course, that "up to" could mean the real figure is, say, one in 60,000 pages – they're leaving their options open there.
"In 2006 more than any previous year, the Web became ground-zero for criminal malware attacks,” says Dan Nadir, VP of product strategy at ScanSafe. “The nature and types of threats are proliferating so quickly and becoming so sophisticated that the Web has become one of the fastest growing threat vectors. The key lesson is that you cannot simply rely on periodically updated databases of suspect URLs or anti-virus engines alone to protect your network from Web threats.”
The issue could be increasingly important this year, particularly as the very selling point of many Web 2.0 sites is that they're easy to understand for newer internet users – just the sort of people most at risk from dodgy malware.