Earlier this week I sat in on the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. One of the more lively research papers presented was on insecurities in the online pornography industry. The paper [0] has also been written about by Threatpost [1]. As noted by Naraine’s article the team crawled just over 35,000 websites using an automated system. Interestingly the team discovered that about 3.23% of those sites were also infected with drive by downloads. One aspect of the research I was curious about was the degree to which those infected porn sites were popular. I spoke with Dr Wondracek after his talk to speak about the possibility of figuring this out. In my own thesis last semester I discovered that of the sampled sites we receive from our data partners less than 3% of the those were listed as popular by Alexa.
[edit: moved links to bottom in footnote format for better readability]
[0] http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/papers/session2/weis2010_wondracek.pdf
[1] http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/understanding-porn-malware-connections-060810
[2] http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
