Barracuda Labs has released its 2010 Midyear Security Report after conducting a study across Bing, Google, Twitter and Yahoo.
Barracuda conducted a study across Bing, Google, Twitter and Yahoo! over a roughly two-month period. The analysis reviews more than 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results.
The purpose of the study was to analyze trending topics on popular search engines to understand the scope of the problem and to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors.
Highlights:
- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution – turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed.
- Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.
- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.
- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.
Read more at Barracuda Labs Blogs | Download Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security PDF Report.
