Most Websites and Web Apps no Match for Attack Barrage

The average website is attacked 50 times per day, with small businesses especially vulnerable.

No matter how large or small, websites and web applications are under a constant barrage of attacks. Two new studies out today put a finer point on the numbers, showing just how frequently attacks hit the average website and how this constant pressure is yielding a huge number of compromised websites and web apps.

According to the Sitelock Website Security Insider Q1 2018 report, the average website today is attacked 50 times per day, with the vast majority of attacks coming through automated means. The study shows that 88% of traffic filtered by firewalls is from bad bots seeking to compromise sites.

By casting a very wide and automated net, attackers who hit their marks even a slim percentage of the time stand to compromise a huge volume of sites. The study shows that about 1% of sampled sites studied by analysts are infected with malware. That means at any given moment, 18.7 million sites around the world are infected by some form of malware.

In addition to studying websites, the SiteLock study surveyed small business owners about their attitudes with regard to website security and found that they may not understand the severity of the danger. Approximately 42% of the respondents said their biggest website security fear is defacement — but most security veterans know this kind of attack is the least of a website’s worries. The study shows that only about 18% of site infections have anything to do with that. More common are backdoor files being placed on the site — 44% of the time — or filehacker files designed to modify or create additional malicious files, at 49% of the time.

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Read more: Dark Reading