More Than 560,000 Websites Infected In Q4

A total of 5.5 million Web pages on more than 560,000 Websites were infected in the fourth quarter, according to new data, with evidence that attackers are waging less noticeable exploits in order to remain under the radar.

Dasient, which compiled the data from its proprietary malware analysis tool that gathers information on malware attacks on Websites, says the fourth-quarter 2009 numbers are actually a slight decline from the third quarter, when it found more than 640,000 infected Websites and 5.8 million infected Web pages.

The decline, in part, could have to do with smarter, more sophisticated attacks: Infections of newly compromised Websites of 10 or more pages on average hit about 24 percent of the pages on those sites, a jump of 19 percent from Q3. The infections basically spread to more pages on each site in the fourth quarter, according to Dasient's report.