Cisco Systems, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) recently released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments, and individuals face, particularly as computer users become more mobile in blending personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours.
Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person's online activity becomes shadier, findings from Cisco's 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats do not target pornography, pharmaceutical, or gambling sites as much as they do legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences, such as major search engines, retail sites, and social media outlets. In fact, Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site. Viewing online advertisements? Advertisements are 182 times as likely to deliver malicious content than pornography. The surprising conclusion of the Cisco study is this: All of the advice you’ve received about sticking with known, trusted Web sites seems to be wrong or not helpful. In fact, the more legitimate a site is, the more likely
you are to catch a Malware infection from it.
So keep your anti-virus program up to date—and don’t ignore any warnings that may pop up, regardless what site you are visiting.
