Many of us know to stay away from unfamiliar websites — with links to them sometimes sent by a stranger via email or posted on social media sites like Facebook — to avoid malware. But in a new report, Google says familiar, legitimate sites that have been compromised by hacks pose a threat too, especially if there's any kind of delay checking for malware by even the most vigilant of webmasters.
The information was shared by the search giant in a new worldwide transparency report about Safe Browsing, which found that 2 percent of the 14.2 million websites based in the U.S. that were scanned by Google were hosting malware. That compares to 8 percent of the sites scanned in Russia and the Ukraine; in places like Turkey and Italy, it was 11 percent.
