Hijacking Incidents Exceed 760K Per Year According to Google Security Study

Over 700,000 websites were breached between June 2014 and July 2015, according to a new study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, which aims to improve web security. The research showed that "miscreants" had routinely hijacked thousands of vulnerable web servers for "cheap hosting and traffic acquisition". Google recorded 760,935 "hijacking incidents" within the period but said that its direct communication with webmasters had curbed the amount of breaches. Google's Safe Browsing Alerts work by sending notifications to network administrators when harmful URLs are detected on their networks. It said that these had increased the likelihood of a "cleanup" by over 50 percent and reduced "infection lengths" by at least 62 percent. As miscreants routinely hijack thousands of vulnerable web servers weekly for cheap hosting and traffic acquisition, security services have turned to notifications both to alert webmasters of ongoing incidents as well as to expedite recovery. The study captures the life cycle of 760,935 hijacking incidents from July, 2014– June, 2015, as identified by Google Safe Browsing and Search Quality. We observe that direct communication with webmasters increases the likelihood of cleanup by over 50% and reduces infection lengths by at least 62%. A sizeable fraction of site owners do not address the root cause of compromise, with over 12% of sites falling victim to a new attack within 30 days. We distill these findings into a set of recommendations for improving web security and best practices for webmasters.Can cyber security vendors design mitigation techniques to stem the tide of hijacking incidents? Share your predictions with the Cloud and Cyber Security Center: http://cloudandcybersecurity.blogspot.com/