Over 750,000 websites were breached in just a year, Google says

A recent study conducted by Google in collaboration with UC Berkeley reveals that a staggering 760,935 websites were compromised in just one year.

The research tests the effectiveness of Google’s Safe Browsing Alerts initiative that aims to actively notify network administrators of potential security breaches and harmful URLs on their websites.

Analysing data collected between the period of July, 2014 and June, 2015, the researchers observe that continuous communication with webmasters makes it 50 percent more likely for admins to eliminate reported issues.

Additionally, the study claims that sending notifications to admins could decrease the infection length of a website by at least 62 percent.

The researchers also measured the technical ability of webmasters to successfully deal with security breaches.

According to their findings, 80 percent of administrators managed to get rid of harmful content from their first attempt, with only 12 percent falling victim to a new attack within 30 days of allegedly fixing a bug.

The report also shows that over a third of all compromised websites Google detected were in English, with Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian completing the top five.

At present, Google monitors over 22,000 autonomous systems or about 40 percent of all active networks.

The study is part of Google’s efforts to make the Web a safer place by attracting webmasters to sign up to its Safe Browsing Alerts.

via The Register