DNS - Barracuda Deems Google 'King of Malware'

Google (News - Alert) has been crowned the king of search and the king of online advertising. But recently the company was presented with another title, one which it would obviously prefer to be without: the king of malware.

That’s according to Barracuda Networks (News - Alert), which recently conducted a two-month study that turned up the results indicating Google links to twice as much malware as its competitors Bing, Twitter and Yahoo combined. The former company presented the study’s results at DefCON 18 last week.

The study indicates that Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent in terms of results involving malware.

“Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter,” says Paul Judge, chief research officer and vice president at Barracuda Networks. “Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users.”

As part of the study, Barracuda looked at 25 million Twitter accounts, legitimate and malicious, to discover that as Twitter activity increases, so does malicious activity related to the activity. “The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent,” according to the Barracuda report, which indicates that more than half of the malware for Twitter found was between the hours of 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. GMT.

Barracuda Networks sells security-related premises-based gateways and software, virtual appliances, cloud services. As reported by TMCnet, Barracuda recently enhanced its Web Application Firewall in an effort to extend centralization of front-end access controls, simplify management of production Web applications and enhancing overall security for enterprise networks and assets.