How risky is the Internet?

Sites trusting other sites

The reasons also included a bunch of things users can’t control at all — 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.

That means that when you’re visiting a website you presumably trust, you’re actually dealing with dozens of sites, most of which you never even heard of.

When you visit a site, you’re also visiting every site that site visits. Sound familiar?

The active content risks had a pretty wide range, but even the best hovered around 20%. That’s one in five top sites — bad odds for the site visitor trying to get away clean. By the way, in addition to videos and other related items, “active content” 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 and Flash, too — programming often justifiably vilified for its vulnerabilities, a problem compounded by site owners’ failure to update.

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?

Vulnerable Web software

The report also states that many of the world’s most popular websites don’t have to worry about their partners letting them down; they take care of that part just fine — by using outdated servers. Some hadn’t been updated in years or even decades. Such sites are extremely vulnerable to malware and breaches, which in turn puts their visitors at risk.

Web software that isn’t updated can be weaponized

If last year’s WannaCry outbreak taught the world anything, it’s that updating software in time is important. Or did it?