Malware epidemic demands a united front

Cybercriminals are a busy bunch these days: stealing identities by the millions, grabbing credit and debit card account numbers, and waging a myriad other attacks on unwitting users, businesses and vulnerable websites. Their weapon of choice is the malware injection. Today, a page is infected every five seconds, triple the infection rate in 2007.

Among the most vulnerable -- and the most lucrative for cybercriminals due to their enormous reach -- are trusted, popular sites with unpatched vulnerabilities. In mid-2007, iFrame and SQL injections of malware began infecting legitimate websites, and the public started to heed the warnings of IT security analysts and pundits. The tone of their battle-cry was calm but unequivocal: Web 2.0 -- and its defining features of social networking, RSS feeds, user-generated content and mash-up applications -- would open up new opportunities for cybercriminals.

Basic classification of websites is fine and necessary. But the approach doesn’t address the reality that good sites can turn bad in a matter of hours, or even minutes. Or that criminals are using the entire internet as a computing grid for attacks, begging the question “Shouldn’t we be doing the same to protect ourselves?”