In a spiritual sense, the opposite is true.
However, when it comes to having your computer infected by a computer virus, unfortunately, religious websites can be more dangerous than porn websites.
According to the Internet Security Threat Report, “religious or ideologically themed sites were three times more likely to infect a computer with a virus than sites with adult content.”
First, let me just say, when you add “ideologically themed” with “religious,” you’ve immediately attached a whole bunch of weirdos and wackos to the bunch.
Unibomber? Fred Phelps? Hello!
I would be more interested in the stats that dealt with legit religious views — setting ideologically themed aside. That would be like throwing Megavideo (generic term for all websites dealing with pirated movies) in statistics about movie websites. Would you still visit IMDb?
Of course you would!
None the less, here’s Symantec’s explanation about their results:
“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.”
That explains why pornography websites keep it clean (not the best choice of words), but what about the religious sites? Is this an attack on Christianity?
Nope.
Adam Shields put it best:
The common thread is that they are run by people that feel called, but don’t actually have any technical skill.
Let this be a reminder, a wake-up call of sorts, to the Church tech community.
Now, here’s what you need to do to make sure you’re not one of these “religious websites!”
[via Christianity Today | HT: Chris Ames | Image via Casey Fleser]
Ben Miller says
I’m going to guess that “religious” sites are no more vulnerable than an average WordPress-based site of any other content category.
Eric Dye says
Agreed. I don’t like how they lump religious with ideological. Seems … I don’t know … meh?
Steve K says
I’ve come across these threads and I am great disappointed in the misreading of the report.
Symantec report – http://www.symantec.com/threatreport/
“Moreover, religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites.” (see page 33)
What the report did not state is religious sites are 3x more likely to be infected or have malware, but that an infected religious (or ideological) site will have more threats than an infected adult/porn site.
Yes, we need to check our sites for security threats. But, even more so, we need to check our sources and facts when publishing news like this.
Eric Dye says
You brought up a good point, however, I think we would be naive to think that religious websites have 3x more infections on infectious websites, while still having the same (or less) number of infected websites as everyone else. If that were true, it would mean religious sites are as clean as everyone else, but when they’re infected, they’re three times as bad? I doubt it. You can slice this up a number of different ways, but I think the conclusion is the same: Religious sites need to clean-up their act.
As for the inference that religious websites are three times more likely to infect (as it’s stated in quotation marks), you’ll have to take that up with the AFP.
Steve K says
The full report does provide a lot more slicing and dicing, and you’re right – we do need to take our presence on the web seriously. Use a reputable hosting company, choose a stable and well-maintained platform, apply all your updates, be smart about usernames and passwords and find someone who is tech-savvy enough to put it all together and monitor it.
While religion and ideological could have fared better, there were categories that were much worse, yet this went unnoticed. Government/Legal/Military sites were 2.5x worse than Religion/Ideological and Education/Reference topped the Government/Legal/Military by another 20 basis points, putting them 3x more infectious than Religion/Ideological sites.
There are 2 calls to action the arise from this report – #1 clean up your websites and secure them, and #2 make sure we are represented truthfully in the media.
Eric Dye says
Good points. I think the contrast with religion and porn was the real headline getter, here.
Great thoughts, Steve, thank you for adding so much value to this!!!