E-Business
Almost Half of World’s Top Websites Risky – Report
Nearly half (46%) of the Internet’s top one million Web sites, as ranked by Alexa, are risky.
This is according to a study released yesterday by US-based cyber security firm Menlo Security, which notes this is largely due to vulnerable software running on Web servers and on underlying ad network domains.
The firm says the results are significant because risky sites have never been easier to exploit, and traditional security products fail to provide adequate protection.
Attackers have their veritable choice of half the Web to exploit, allowing them to launch phishing attacks from legitimate sites, it notes.
Menlo Security considers a site risky if the homepage or associated background sites are running vulnerable software, if the site is ‘known-bad’, or if it has had a security incident in the past 12 months.
Vulnerable software was the leading factor in classifying a site as risky, it points out. Of the one million sites, 355 804 were either running vulnerable software or accessing background domains running vulnerable software; 166 853 fell into known-bad categories; while 31 938 experienced a recent security incident.
Another key finding was that background requests sending content to Web browsers outnumber user requests at a ratio of 25:1.
The culprit sites found in the study include destinations that are widely unknown by name; however, these large ad service networks are found hidden behind the world’s most visited media sites and include sites for 24-hour news, weather sites and major metro newspapers.
“Browsing the Web is a leap into the unknown. We already knew that ad networks present risk to the public and businesses, but the extreme levels reached in 2016, affecting 46% of the most visited Web sites, mean that enterprises must address the problem,” says Kowsik Guruswamy, CTO at Menlo Security.
Greg Maudsley, senior director of product marketing, and Jason Steer, solutions architect, EMEA at Menlo Security, point out that risk is not just associated with the sites that users visit. Each site a user visits generates requests to on average 25 requests to background Web sites, such as social media and advertising.
They explain business and economy Web sites feature highly when the information is sliced all ways for risky issues (third highest for known-bad sites, highest for domains associated with recent threat history, and highest for sites with known vulnerable software), but almost all businesses would not block access to business and economy, leading many businesses into a false sense of security and more cyber incidents to deal with.
The security experts say uncategorised Web sites are the highest type of sites associated with being known-bad, followed by adult and pornography as well as business and economy. Vulnerable software was found to be 16 years old in the one million subset.
Menlo Security notes today, exploit kits are readily available to anyone, as are the instructional videos that provide step-by-step execution instructions.
The expertise requirement has all but vanished. Underscoring this point, the average age of suspected cyber attackers dropped from 24 to 17.
Compounding the issue, it says the vast majority of malware prevention products attempt to prevent attacks by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” elements, and then implement policies intended to allow “good” content and block the “bad”.
In every case, the firm explains, the detection is never perfect, and thus the policy choice involves a level of risk that the wrong decision is being made. Additionally, enterprises regularly allow access to popular Web sites for the sake of productivity. Given the risk associated with nearly half of popular sites, a Web security strategy based on categorisation is effectively useless, says Menlo Security.
It adds although traditional phishing attacks involve the creation of a new imposter, or “spoofed” site, the sheer volume of vulnerable trusted sites makes it very easy for attackers to compromise a legitimate site and send that link as part of a phishing campaign.
With this approach, the firm notes, attackers no longer need to worry that URL filtering will thwart their efforts, and they avoid anomalies in the link address, such as misspellings, special characters, or numbers that might raise suspicions.
Clicking on what is a perfectly legitimate link within such a phishing e-mail can expose a user to a drive-by malware exploit that could deliver ransomware, or mark the beginning of a larger breach.
Risk mitigation
To mitigate the risks, Maudsley and Steer recommend new threat prevention techniques, such as isolation and remote browsing.
They add Web site owners should make sure they are running up-to-date software, patch vulnerable software, and ensure only trusted resource files are loaded from third-party servers. Users should use browser extensions and plugins that stop execution of JavaScript, stop using Flash altogether, and use Adblockers to block ads on sites where possible, they note.
Gartner recommends isolation as part of its adaptive security architecture – this approach does not try to distinguish between good and bad, but assumes all active content is risky.
Contrary to popular belief, using cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools slowed down experienced software developers when they were working in codebases familiar to them, rather than supercharging their work, a new study found.
AI research nonprofit METR conducted the in-depth study, on a group of seasoned developers earlier this year while they used Cursor, a popular AI coding assistant, to help them complete tasks in open-source projects they were familiar with.
Before the study, the open-source developers believed using AI would speed them up, estimating it would decrease task completion time by 24%. Even after completing the tasks with AI, the developers believed that they had decreased task times by 20%. But the study found that using AI did the opposite: it increased task completion time by 19%.
The study’s lead authors, Joel Becker and Nate Rush, said they were shocked by the results: prior to the study, Rush had written down that he expected “a 2x speed up, somewhat obviously.”
The findings challenge the belief that AI always makes expensive human engineers much more productive, a factor that has attracted substantial investment into companies selling AI products to aid software development.
AI is also expected to replace entry-level coding positions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.
Prior literature on productivity improvements has found significant gains: one study found using AI sped up coders by 56%, another study found developers were able to complete 26% more tasks in a given time.
But the new METR study shows that those gains don’t apply to all software development scenarios. In particular, this study showed that experienced developers intimately familiar with the quirks and requirements of large, established open source codebases experienced a slowdown.
Other studies often rely on software development benchmarks for AI, which sometimes misrepresent real-world tasks, the study’s authors said.
The slowdown stemmed from developers needing to spend time going over and correcting what the AI models suggested.
“When we watched the videos, we found that the AIs made some suggestions about their work, and the suggestions were often directionally correct, but not exactly what’s needed,” Becker said.
The authors cautioned that they do not expect the slowdown to apply in other scenarios, such as for junior engineers or engineers working in codebases they aren’t familiar with.
Still, the majority of the study’s participants, as well as the study’s authors, continue to use Cursor today.
The authors believe it is because AI makes the development experience easier, and in turn, more pleasant, akin to editing an essay instead of staring at a blank page.
“Developers have goals other than completing the task as soon as possible,” Becker said. “So they’re going with this less effortful route.”
Kaspersky GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team) experts have discovered open-source packages that download the Quasar backdoor and a stealer designed to exfiltrate cryptocurrency. The malicious packages are intended for the Cursor AI development environment, which is based on Visual Studio Code — a tool used for AI-assisted coding.
The malicious open-source packages are extensions hosted in the Open VSX repository that claim to provide support for the Solidity programming language. However, in practice, they download and execute malicious code on users’ devices.
During an incident response, a blockchain developer from Russia reached out to Kaspersky after installing one of these fake extensions on his computer, which allowed attackers to steal approximately $500,000 worth of crypto assets.
The threat actor behind these packages managed to deceive the developer by making the malicious package rank higher than the legitimate one. The attacker achieved this by artificially inflating the malicious package’s downloads count to 54,000.
After installation, the victim gained no actual functionality from the extension. Instead, malicious ScreenConnect software was installed on the computer, granting threat actors remote access to the infected device.
Using this access, they deployed the open-source Quasar backdoor along with a stealer that collects data from browsers, email clients, and crypto wallets. With these tools, the threat actors were able to obtain the developer’s wallet seed phrases and subsequently steal cryptocurrency from the accounts.
After the malicious extension downloaded by the developer was discovered and removed from the repository, the threat actor republished it and artificially inflated its installation count to a higher number – 2 million, compared to 61,000 for the legitimate package. The extension was removed from the platform following a request from Kaspersky.
“Spotting compromised open-source packages with the naked eye is becoming increasingly difficult. Threat actors are using increasingly creative tactics to deceive potential victims, even developers who have a strong understanding of cybersecurity risks — particularly those working in the blockchain development field.
As we expect adversaries to continue targeting developers, it is recommended that even experienced IT professionals deploy dedicated security solutions to safeguard sensitive data and prevent financial losses,” commented Georgy Kucherin, Security Researcher with Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team.
The threat actor behind the attack published not only malicious Solidity extensions but also another NPM package, solsafe, which also downloads ScreenConnect. A few months earlier, three additional malicious Visual Studio Code extensions were released — solaibot, among-eth, and blankebesxstnion — all of them have already been removed from the repository.
Kashifu Inuwa CCIE, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has reaffirmed the Federal Government’s unwavering commitment to achieving 95% digital literacy across Nigeria by the year 2030, with an ambitious milestone of 70% by 2027.
This disclosure was made in total alignment with the present administration’s priority areas of reforming the economy for sustained inclusive growth and accelerating diversification through industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation.
Making this known during a collaborative meeting hosted by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Inuwa highlighted the government’s strategic prioritisation of human capital development as central to its national transformation agenda.
“We started this journey in 2023 when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came on board and he made it clear that economic diversification and inclusivity are part of the administration’s agenda,” he noted.
“And the president outlined this in 8 priority areas to achieve the vision, with priority number 7 specifically focused on accelerating industrialisation, digitisation, creative arts, manufacturing, and innovation,” he added.
Recognising the importance of digital fluency in achieving this agenda, he stated that NITDA is committed to investing in the digital empowerment of citizens through the development of the National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), a strategic blueprint aligned with international best practices.
He added that to tailor the framework to Nigeria’s specific needs, 6 core competency areas were incorporated to include device and software operations, information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, content creation, safety, and problem solving.
He explained that the framework would address all levels of digital fluency, from basic, intermediate to advanced levels, to make digital skills accessible to every Nigerian, from primary school pupils to working professionals.
According to Inuwa, despite data limitations, NITDA estimates that Nigeria’s digital literacy rate currently stands at 50%, up from 44% in 2021, based on extrapolations from the World Bank’s Better Life Report.
The NITDA DG disclosed that the agency has been working closely with the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) in developing a curriculum for digital literacy, which can be infused into formal education. Stating that the visit is a continuation of NITDA’s ongoing engagements with key education stakeholders, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Universities Commission (NUC), and the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), all aimed at advancing digital literacy across all levels of learning.
Inuwa also revealed ongoing collaborations with global platforms such as Coursera to train teachers using AI-powered lesson generation tools and provide scalable online training.
It is worth recalling that late last year, NITDA partnered with the Nasarawa State University in collaboration with CISCO in launching the Digital Learning for NSUK (DL4NSUK) initiative to enhance digital literacy in tertiary institutions, and equipping graduates with the skills needed to be digitally proficient and globally competitive.
While stressing that the entire process, from curriculum development to classroom delivery, would require a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Inuwa said, “This is not a journey we can walk alone; we must bring everyone on board, education stakeholders, technology providers, state governments, and international partners.”
In response to the DG’s remarks, UBEC Executive Secretary, Hajiya Aisha Garba, confirmed that the Commission has officially received the digital literacy curriculum developed by NITDA and NERDC and has commenced internal review processes.
She acknowledged the curriculum as robust and forward-looking but stressed the need for simplification to suit early learners and teachers, citing challenges such as curriculum overload, limited teacher capacity, and inadequate infrastructure as key barriers to effective implementation.
She pledged that UBEC, in partnership with the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), will lead efforts to equip schools with computers and solar-powered infrastructure to support real learning.
“We’re committed to working with NITDA and NERDC to refine the curriculum, train teachers, and ensure effective delivery. Let us align the technical vision with grassroots realities to make a lasting impact,” she concluded.
To formalise the implementation of the meeting’s resolutions, a joint inter-agency committee was established to develop strategic plans that will ensure the effective rollout of the digital literacy initiative, to equip young Nigerians with the essential digital skills required to thrive in an increasingly dynamic and technology-driven global landscape.
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