According to Dasient, about 1 million Web sites, or 1% of the Internet websites, were spreading malware, or malicious code, in the second quarter of this year, which represents a sharp increase. The web security firm says that the calculated number was extrapolated from a sample scan of millions of websites and from customer deployments of its services.
The most popular attack is done by drive by download attacks where malicious code gets pushed out. Additionally, recent vulnerabilities in Sun’s Java framework as well as ASP.NET have paved way for hackers to target web surfers. Also, .com and .cn top level domain names accounted for the most top level domains used by attackers.