Si Cyber Intel: New Initiative Takes Down 100,000 Malware Sites In Just Ten Months

At the end of March 2018, cyber security non-profit abuse.ch launched a new initiative called URLhaus. The primary goal of the project was to collect and share URLs that are being used to distribute malware.

To date, URLhaus has successfully taken down nearly 100,000 malware distribution URLs worldwide and within just a 10-month period! Together with the community, 265 security researchers situated globally, have identified and submitted 300 malware sites to URLhaus every day.

Although this effort is a huge feat in the InfoSec world, there is still a lot more work to be done as numbers show that the average response time from many web hosting providers is very slow and what took 3 days is now taking up to 8 days. With each response time increasing, it paves the way for malware authors to continue infecting thousands of devices every day.

Overall this group effort is monumental in protecting our networks and users from malware campaigns and we look forward to seeing how this project develops in 2019.