Google lists the top ten malware sites on the web

In response to a recent surge in websites being infected with malware, Google has revealed the top ten most popular malware sites in the last couple of months.

Google has been identifying web pages that attempt to exploit visitors by installing and running malware automatically - what is known as drive by downloads since 2006.

All the domains on the top 10 list were suspected to have compromised more than 10,000 websites - and included gumblar.cn and martuz.cn, mass compromises that were widely reported by security vendors.

Google said gumblar compromised 60,000 sites, while martuz peaked at 35,000. Beladen.net was recently said to be responsible for a mass compromise, but it only made position 124 on Google's list of 3,500 sites.

Niels Provos, part of Google's security team, said its automated systems found 4,000 different domains that appeared to be set up for distributing such malware.

He said that of these domains, more than 1,400 had the .cn top level domain, while others played on the name of Google such as goooogleadsense.biz and googleanalytics.net.

The top ten malware sites can be found here.