According to a new study, internet users who browse adult or gambling websites are far more likely to develop malware.
According to a new study, navigating the Internet is always dangerous, but it becomes even more dangerous if you visit websites that contain pornographic or gambling content.
Malware Targets Gambling and Adult Content Users
The study, undertaken by Fabio Massacci and a team from the University of Trento and Vrije University in Amsterdam, employed a large amount of data to reach this conclusion.
The research was not intended to discredit a certain collection of websites from the start, but rather to discover the actions that lead to people catching malware in the first place.
Massacci used 20,000 entries from Trend Micro’s 12-million data collection, which investigated netizen activity in the United States, Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy.
Massacci and his colleagues rapidly identified pornographic and gambling content as the most likely sources of malware risks, however the study noted that frequency of use also plays a role.
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“Both system behavior and content behavior increase the risk of encountering different types of malware,” Massacci told me. Even while the research suggests that adult and gambling websites are more likely to include malware, there is no “silver bullet” remedy.
Understanding Risk Factors and Malware Hotbeds.
Interestingly, hackers were more likely to attack such websites, but not only them; many would focus on websites that taught how to commit crimes and avoid detection. Another focus were websites that explained “how to hack” or do other nonviolent crimes.
The attacks ranged from trojan horses to cryptocurrency mining malware that commandeered a computer’s CPU and GPU to extract crypto tokens, as well as keyloggers.
The report particularly mentions “illegal gambling websites,” implying that licensed websites may be less likely to result in such security issues.
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