50,000+ New Booby-trapped Web Sites Every Week

If a recent article at CBN News is to be believed then ‘hackers’ and other nasty types around the world create about 50,000 new booby-trapped Web sites every week. The source article can be found here.

The seed information used by the CBN article came from PandaLabs—which is a computer and networking security company.

50,000 is a huge increase to the 100 to 500 ‘trick’ sites that were thought to be being created by these sorts of people in 2001. In fact, if we use the mid-point of 300 then 50,000 per week works out to a 166 times increase in the creation of bogus careful-you-don’t-fall-in sites over the last 9 to 10 years.

So. Why do they do it?

These trick Web sites are put out there by these people for two reasons: Either to infect computers with viruses or other sneaky malicious computer code; or to try and harvest personal or banking details from you.

Either way the final play is to try and relieve you of some of your money.

The thing is that they wouldn’t keep doing it if it wasn’t working, but it does. It is amazing what information some people will provide to an official looking site pretending to be a government agency, financial advisory, or a bank. It is estimated that these money-trap Web sites skim between 8 and 14 million dollars (US) off people every week. This sounds like a lot of money but when you factor in that there is 140 million people surfing the Web at any given point in time then that is only 10c each per week or $5.20 each over a year—not that it works out this way (obviously).