Herding Vulnerable Cats: A Statistical Approach to Disentangle Joint Responsibility for Web Security in Shared Hosting

摘要: Hosting providers play a key role in fighting web compromise, but their ability to prevent abuse is constrained by the security practices of own customers. Shared hosting, offers unique perspective since customers operate under restricted privileges and retain more control over configurations. We present first empirical analysis distribution features software patching shared hosting providers, influence on these practices, impact compromise rates. construct provider-level global market for -- containing 1,259 gathering indicators from 442,684 domains. Exploratory factor 15 identifies four main latent factors that capture efforts: content security, webmaster infrastructure application security. confirm, via fixed-effect regression model, exert significant latter two factors, which are both related stack environment. Finally, means GLM phishing malware abuse, we show explain between 10% 19% variance at after controlling size. For web-application instance, found when provider moves bottom best-performing 10%, it would experience 4 times fewer incidents. have patch levels--even higher stack, where CMSes can run as client-side software--and this tied substantial reduction levels.