BBC Claims 1 in 10 Web Pages Contain Malicious Code
May 16th, 2007 by Stephen
The BBC writes:
One in 10 web pages scrutinised by search giant Google contained malicious code that could infect a user’s PC.
That may seem a worryingly high proportion! Fortunately it is also nonsense.
Looking at the actual paper, it seems that Google in fact analyzed several billion pages, and sifted these with a preliminary analysis tool called MapReduce
“MapReduce processed all the crawled web pages for properties indicative of exploits”. As it says in the paper, “MapReduce allows us to prune several billion URLs into a few million”. This process left around 4.5 million pages that were likely candidates. Out of those, they found 450,000 pages that they were confident were correctly identified as malicious.
So it is not 1 in 10 pages. It is perhaps 450,000 pages in several billion. It’s more like 1 in 10,000.
The BBC failed to spot this - although perhaps that is not surprising, considering some examples of previous sloppy scientific reporting by the corporation (and most other media corporations of course).
Yeah I would also doubt the 1 in 10. If it was 1 in 10, I think we would all be in trouble with our computers lol.