Study says 1 in 3 top most-visited websites face risk of hack attacks

A new study has revealed that one in three top websites that are most visited by people on the internet are "risky."

Menlo reviewed the top 1 million domains on the Web for potential vulnerabilities and found that one in three could be categorized as "risky," meaning they had either been compromised already by hackers or were running vulnerable software that left them vulnerable to attack, reported CBS News.

Menlo although did not disclose which websites were vulnerable but most of the "risky" sites were not porn sites or questionable domains. The report showed that a website related to transportation, health and medicine, technology or business was just as likely to put visitors at risk of exposure to damaging malware. It also revealed that one in four of the most trusted sites including, education and government domains, were found to be vulnerable.

According to Menlo, 99 percent of malware infections came from basic Internet browsing.

Analysts cross-referenced 1.75 million URLs against a list of known malicious sites, checked the reputation of the IP address associated with each, and fingerprinted the software running each website to assess whether it had been updated with the latest security patches. About 21 percent of the websites had not been patched.