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Friday 9 March 2012

Will visiting Blinkx.com infect your computer?

I've coved Blinkx before in connection with unwanted software installations. They recently came to my attention again.. and not in a good way.

Let's start with the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics for blinkx.com:

Safe Browsing

Diagnostic page for blinkx.com

What is the current listing status for blinkx.com?
This site is not currently listed as suspicious.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 1007 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 92 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2012-03-09, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2012-03-08.Malicious software includes 6 trojan(s), 1 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine.
Malicious software is hosted on 6 domain(s), including miopardenton.bee.pl/, inturpo.com/, ighlandhorn.jesais.fr/.
5 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including inturpo.com/, adv-adserver.com/, adversalservers.com/.
This site was hosted on 32 network(s) including AS209 (QWEST), AS14743 (INTERNAP), AS1299 (TELIANET).
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Over the past 90 days, blinkx.com did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.
Has this site hosted malware?
No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.
Next steps:


Not listed as suspicious? But 92 out of 1007 pages attempt to install malware! That's 9.1% of all pages on the site that Google checked! But people who visit Blinkx don't just visit one page. According to Alexa, the average visitor views 3.88 pages on the site. It also notes that blinkx.com is the 1994th most popular site worldwide.


We can work out the probability of infection using the data, it's is (1-(1-(92/1007))^3.88)) which equates to a 31% possibility that the average blinkx.com visitor will be exposed to malware. OK, that's assuming that the data is accurate, and since I know for a fact there are more than 1007 pages on Blinkx and that Alexa data has its critics.. well, take that figure as being indicative rather than 100% accurate.

Compete.com reports that over 5 million US visitors look at the site per month. There are doubtless millions more visiting this site. So exactly how many people have been infected while visiting blinkx.com?

My suggestions? If you are an IT administrator, I think you want to seriously consider if allowing your users to visit blinkx.com is in line with your corporate governance strategy..

1 comment:

Heather McCalley said...

I received a bitly link to it in a FB chat two days ago...assume my friend used a rogue app