Google’s study was focused on the so-called drive-by download web pages, which are able to install and run malware on PCs without user action. At present time, the research states, there are over 3.4 million such URLs on more than 181,000 web sites.
Even worse, the figures are more than likely to grow. While one year ago only 0.3% of search queries contained a link to a malware site, by the end of the year it had already went up to 1.3%.
The study found that the country hosting the most malware sites was China (67%). Next in line (if we can call it this way, given the great distance between them) are the US, with only 15%. Russia came in third (4%), followed by Malaysia (2.2%) and Korea (2.0%).
Over 66.5 million URLs have been examined for the research.