Volunteer-Based Project Succeeds in Taking Down 100,000 Malware Distribution Sites Within 10 Months

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Volunteer-Based Project Succeeds in Taking Down 100,000 Malware Distribution Sites Within 10 Months

By CircleID Reporter
January 24, 2019, 8:47 pm PST Views: 11,955 Add Comment

In March of 2018, abuse.ch, a non-profit cybersecurity organization in Switzerland, launched a project called URLhaus to collect and share URLs identified to be distributing malware. Ten months later, the group has reported that the project has proven to be quite effective with close to 100,000 malware distribution sites being taken down as a result. “During that time, 265 security researchers located all over the world have identified and submitted in average 300 malware sites to URLhaus each day,” reported abuse.ch this week.

Project succeeded beyond the infosec community; URLhaus also managed to get the attention of many hosting providers: “This is not an easy task, especially for large hosting providers that have tens of thousands of customers and hence a significant amount hijacked websites in their network that are getting abused by cybercriminals to distribute malware.”

The chart below produced by absue.ch shows the number of active malware distribution sites tracked since the launch of URLhaus.

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By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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