Seifert, Christian, Stirling, D., Welch, Ian and Komisarczuk, Peter (2008) Internet NZ study - stage 1 report. Technical Report. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, NZ.

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Abstract

Broadband connectivity and the great variety of services offered over the Internet have made it an important source of information and entertainment and a major means of communication. In 2008, users are more connected than ever.
With connectivity to the Internet, however, come security threats. Because the Internet is a global network, an attack can be delivered anonymously from any location in the world. In 2003, a study was published that compared vulnerabilities in web servers from various countries. It showed that web sites in the New Zealand domain were one of the most vulnerable to Google hacking attacks.
Vulnerable web servers lead to compromised web servers, which do not only pose a risk to operators of these web servers, but also to their users or customers, because the attackers might insert client-side attacks that trigger upon interaction with such a compromised server.
As part of work commissioned by InternetNZ, Victoria University of Wellington has gathered intelligence on the threat from malicious servers across different country domains (.au, .com, .nz, and .uk) In this study, it was assessed whether the web servers located in the nz domains would show an elevated percentage of malicious web servers in line with their vulnerability independent by Nehring [4].
Results of this study show malicious URLs in all domains. Inspecting 664,000 URLs, 38 malicious URLs were identified. The majority of these malicious URLs were unknown to providers of security products/ services therefore unable to protect potential end users that visit those URLs.
No indications were detected that show an elevated percentage of malicious web servers in the nz domain. Rather, a statistically significant elevated percentage was detected in the au domain compared to any other domain inspected.
In the nz domain, three malicious URLs were detected in this study that scanned part of the nz domain. Assuming approximately 4 million web servers exist in the nz domain, the number of malicious web servers is estimated to be in the order of 640 or 0.00016%.
In the next stage of this work, all web servers in the nz domain will be inspected
to provide a more complete picture of the threat of client-side attacks to New
Zealand.

Item Type:	Report (Technical Report)
Subjects:	Computing
Depositing User:	Vani Aul
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2014 16:25
Last Modified:	28 Aug 2021 07:05
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/839

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