More evidence of U.S. as malware capital

"It's very clear that a lot of malware is coming from advertisements, and it's difficult to track where the code is originating because of the layers of ad systems, aggregators and agents that work together to create and distribute this content," Ben-Itzhak said. "There are so many third parties pushing ads to these sites, and there is no official process among these parties for seeking out the bad code."

A high-profile example of this type of attack was being distributed on a banner ad posted to social networking site MySpace.com in July 2006, which specifically attempted to use a security flaw in Microsoft Windows to infect Web surfers with spyware.

Finjan’sreport indicates a trend of new efforts to spread malware using Web pages that have been filtered by automatic translation services, which are typically used by people to read content written in foreign languages.  

Because the translation services don't scan for threats, and are often distributed in cooperation with known sources such as news sites or search engines, attackers can use the systems to sneak infected links through to end-users without tipping off security applications that look for unknown content.

"The translation service sends a link that looks fine but the malware is still in there," Ben-Itzhak said. "This is another reason why people need real-time dynamic scanning for protection, because it's so hard to tell what you might actually be looking at these days."