Do News Aggregation Websites Point to Blacklisted Sites?
News aggregation sites, like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Ycombinator and Yahoo Buzz play an important part in the lives of many web-surfers. It is reported that sites like Digg.com have garnered more visitors than heavyweights like Facebook [1].
I was recently asked: “What is the probability of a site listed on popular news aggregation sites to be blacklisted?” The answer to this question is not a very simple one. We understand that benign websites are often compromised by malicious code, sometimes due to application layer vulnerabilities or server side vulnerabilities or a combination of both. Good websites can even be compromised by simple password disclosure, or worse, a blatant nonchalant attitude towards security.
My instinct tells me that any site listed on these well known news aggregation sites, if infected, will be spotted rather quickly by some visitor to the “infected” website. If the webmaster is even half interested in the reputation of their site, they will take prompt action to remove the offending code as the number of visitors providing feedback would continue to grow. Thereby, even if a site listed on a news aggregation site were to be compromised I think it would be fixed up rather quickly.
In short I think the probability of finding an “infected” site listed on these news aggregation websites would be pretty low. To prove this, at StopTheHacker.com we conducted a small test. We analyzed around 1162 unique websites which were pointed to by one of the four news aggregation websites below:
We found that none of the analyzed 1162 sites were listed on Google’s Safe Browsing malware hash list as of January 19, 2010. This might be an indication of the fact that good content, interesting to the masses, is hosted on sites conscious about their security and the safety of their visitors. Given the state of Internet security today, this is one of few heartening trends.
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