Compromised Websites: An Owner’s Perspective

“Compromised Websites: An Owner’s Perspective” chronicles webmasters' experiences with hacked websites. The report presents statistics and opinions on how site owners navigate the process of learning their sites have been hacked and repairing the damage. The report's findings are based on a survey Commtouch and StopBadware designed and offered to website owners and webmasters over the course of several months.

Data from the poll reveals that malicious actors are often able to compromise legitimate websites without the site owners' knowledge: over 90% of respondents didn't notice any strange activity, despite the fact that their sites were being abused to send spam, host phishing pages, or distribute malware.  Nearly two-thirds of the webmasters surveyed didn't know how the compromise had happened.

Other highlights from analysis of the survey's responses include:

• About half of site owners discovered the hack when they attempted to visit their own site and received a browser or search engine warning. 
• 26% of site owners had not yet figured out how to resolve the problem at the time they completed the survey.
• 40% of survey respondents changed their opinion of their web hosting provider following a compromise.