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Casual surfing

Posted on 13 Aug 2008 at 11:12

As with major retail sites, however, the agencies have reputations to protect, so there's a commercial incentive to keep their systems malware-free. Indeed, we couldn't find any report of a major attack being carried out this way; and, after clicking the adverts on a wide range of sites, we failed to find a single dodgy ad.

That's not to say web advertising is wholly benign. The serving agencies use cookies and IP address-logging to build up a picture of websites you visit - a concern if you value your anonymity. Using Firefox with an extension such as Adblock can help by removing the adverts from web pages altogether.

Email

A final hazard for the casual user is email. The days of mass email viruses are hopefully behind us, but spammers send out messages that link to potentially hazardous sites, including malware-hosting pages.

Many spam mails use poor grammar and make wild claims that mark them out as obviously dodgy, but during our tests we received a few highly plausible messages. One promised a voucher for cheap printer cartridges, then took us to the site for an exorbitant text messaging service. Another message promised job vacancies, but the linked page invited us to join a pyramid scheme. The most worrying email we received was a classic phishing attempt, which claimed to come from NatWest. It led us to a lookalike site designed to trick us into entering our banking details.

Such messages show the need for caution, but none of them tried to hit us with malware. We know that it happens, but web-based cons are clearly a more prevalent threat.

Risk rating: LOW

Every online activity carries the potential for infection, but if you're careful where you click and are wary of unsolicited email, you're unlikely to catch anything during casual internet usage.

Is the virus threat real?

Author: Darien Graham-Smith