Five stages of web attacks

The web is a dangerous place. And, according to SophosLabs encounters on average 30,000 new malicious URLs every day, and 60% of them are compromised, legitimate websites. Eighty-five percent of all malware, including viruses, worms, spyware, adware and Trojans, comes from the web.

Further, the opportunities for criminal hackers are growing at an astounding rate. Consider how big the web is and how many people use it daily. There are more than 3.4 billion users on the web each day, conducting 3.5 billion search queries, with Google alone, on over 1 billion websites.

Malicious websites are spreading the infection everywhere and a web threat is happening to millions of web users every day. As per Google Transparency Report, the number of sites deemed dangerous by Safe Browsing is consistently in the hundreds of thousands per week.

This infographic describes how modern web attacks work, broken down into five stages: entry, traffic distribution, exploit, infection and execution.