Over 700,000 websites were breached between June 2014 and July 2015, according to a new study by Google and the University of California, Berkeley, which aims to improve web security.
The research showed that "miscreants" had routinely hijacked thousands of vulnerable web servers for "cheap hosting and traffic acquisition." Google recorded 760,935 "hijacking incidents" within the period but said that its direct communication with webmasters had curbed the amount of breaches, NBC News reported.
Google's Safe Browsing Alerts work by sending notifications to network administrators when harmful URLs are detected on their networks. It said that these had increased the likelihood of a "cleanup" by over 50 percent and reduced "infection lengths" by at least 62 percent.
Attacks were primarily conducted on websites run in English, with attacks on Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian language websites following closely behind.
