Google report: IIS servers more likely to host malicious code

Google report: IIS servers more likely to host malicious code

Google has released some details from their research on around 70,000 domains which were found to be hosting malware/attack code.

The company said that as per the data available with them, IIS powered servers are more likely to be hosting malicious code.

Google’s Nagendra Modadugu wrote in a blog post on their findings: “Compared to our sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often as a malware-distributing server.”

Google’s report found out that IIS and Apache powered servers together are responsible for about 89 percent of all Web sites. But they also are responsible for 98 percent of all Web-based malware.

Incidentally, IIS and Apache based servers were almost equal in numbers in terms of hosting the malicious code. However, the ratio was worse in the case of IIS based servers.

Google however cautioned: “It is important to note that while many servers serve malware as a result of a server compromise … some servers are configured to serve up exploits by their administrators.”

The point being that the study does not indicate that IIS is more likely to get hacked to host malicious code.

Checkout: Web Server Software and Malware