by Dan Seitz
f you get a virus on your computer, you’re faced with a difficult choice. Do you pretend that you’re stupid enough to click random links in your inbox? Or do you just own up to whomever that you’ve been visiting InsaneClownP****.info? Fortunately, the gullibility of webmasters on religious sites has given you a whole new excuse: It turns out religious sites are a hotbed of malware.
Symantec just released its usual yearly overview of Internet security, and it found something that anybody who’s had to clean Grandma’s computer has probably suspected. Namely, that hackers are targeted religious sites at a much higher rate:
…religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it’s not good for repeat business.