Visiting a Porn Site Can Result in Infection
2007
It’s fairly well known that visiting a porn site, while posing no risk to traditional STDs, can give your computer a nasty viral infection. But according to the BBC, the rate of infection from porn sites is higher than most people thought.
The BBC talked to Dr. Gilber Wondracek, a security expert from the International Secure System Lab, which led a recent study on the topic. According to the good doctor, the study took a look at the 90% of 35,000 porno-hosting domains that provided free porn, and found that 3.23% of the 269,000 sites hosted on those domains were were booby-trapped (pun intended) with adware, spyware and/or viruses.
Considering 70% of men under the age of 24 browse porn sites, there is a huge number of potential victims for hackers to run exploits on. The researchers bolstered this theory by setting up a couple of adult sites of their own (only for research – really) and paying to drive traffic to them.
They analyzed the 49,000 visitors (which they got for a measly $160, which is great value for anyone thinking of getting into the business) and found that 20,000 were running a computer and browser combination that was vulnerable to at least one exploit.
Since it’s next to impossible to tell which 96% of the free porn sites aren’t giving you something nasty (to say nothing of the huge number that use other unethical practices like javascript catchers and redirects), Dr. Wondracek recommends making sure security software is up-to-date, and you use any “safe browsing” modes that your browser offers.
