Ads on porn sites increase malware risk: Study

LONDON: Browsing some of the most popular pornography sites on web is increasingly putting users at risk, a research has claimed. Researcher Conrad Longmore found that ads displayed by the sites were found to be installing harmful files without users' knowledge. Longmore also found that two popular sites - xhamster and pornhub - posed the greatest risk, the BBC reports. He said it was primarily Windows users at risk, but that criminals were increasingly turning their attentions to mobile devices. While none of the porn sites observed hosted any malware themselves, it was the embedded advertisements within their pages that created problems for users, he added. According to the report, Longmore compiled his figures using Google's diagnostic advice service. The data showed that xhamster, listed by monitoring firm Alexa as the 46th most popular site on the internet, had malvertising on 1,067 out of 20,986 pages, just five per cent, screened in the past 90 days. Another site, pornhub, was found to have dangerous advertising on 12.7 percent of its pages, the report added.