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Websense Master Database reaches 15 million active websites
Posted on February 08, 2006

Recent increases to the Master Database reflect the continual growth of the Internet as an attack vector by today's cyber-criminals. The Websense database reached 10 million sites in May 2005 and quickly grew to 15 million sites within approximately eight months. Today, the database includes more than 90 categories, such as spyware, phishing and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.

During 2005, software vulnerabilities were increasingly exploited by malicious websites hosting malcode, and the Websense Master Database's security-related categories reflect this growth. For example, since February 2005, spyware-related websites have increased from approximately 48,000 sites to more than 130,000 today -- a 170% upsurge. In addition, during the same time period, phishing and other fraudulent websites have grown approximately 270% from 7,270 to more than 27,000 sites.

"Websense has more than 10 years of specialized Internet mining expertise, and the growth that we have seen over the past year in malicious content has been astonishing," said Patrick Swisher, director, database operations for Websense, Inc.

Other Websense Master Database advancements over the past year include:

-- Malicious websites—more than a 3,900% increase.

-- P2P websites—50% increase.

-- Keyloggers—more than doubled in growth.

-- Instant messaging (IM)—nearly 240% increase.

-- Personal network storage and backup—more than 250% increase.

-- Freeware and software download—more than 117% increase.

To maintain database accuracy, Websense purges dead website links from the database on a daily basis, and to date has removed nearly four million dead links. This is of particular importance for Internet categories that represent Web security risks, such as phishing or fraud-based websites, which have a short life span. Phishing websites are currently online for an average of less than six days and the underlying IP addresses associated with those websites change frequently.

Websense builds and maintains the Master Database with automated tools, based on a combination of classification algorithms as well as human review. In addition, websites are also captured via Websense's WebCatcher technology, by which new or not yet classified websites visited by employees at Websense customer sites are anonymously sent back to Websense for categorization. These newly categorized sites are then made available to all Websense customers via the daily database downloads.

In addition, to maximize security intelligence, the database operations team collaborates with the Websense Security Labs research group to mine and analyze more than 75 million sites a day for malicious mobile code (MMC) and hacks. The team manages a global honeynet of unprotected computers to discover MMC, new Trojan horses, keyloggers and blended threats.
SOURCE: Websense, Inc.