Malware affects 6 Million Websites

eWeek is reporting a new malware outbreak that affects 6 million web pages. Should we be scared? As an IT admin, should there be concern this is more pages than my web proxy or secure web gateway can rate?

The simple answer is no, and there's a good reason to it as well. While there might be 6 million web pages that have been compromised with an iFrame injection containing javascript, this javascript actually leads to only 8 different Ukraine based websites that actually contain the malware. So if you've got a web proxy or secure web gateway that can block embedded URLs (this is key so you can still get to the content on those 6 million web pages), and can rate those 8 pages as malware, you can be pretty confident that you're protected. In fact most malware attacks on the web are pretty similar to this one. While there may be 8 bad sites, there's many more (in this case 6 million) websites that lead you to those 8 bad sites. So while you can't possibly block all 6 million web sites, you can block the 8 bad ones, and prevent users from loading bad embedded URLs on a page.

Just make sure your web proxy or secure web gateway can do this to, and you won't have to worry about the hype, just the reality.