HostExploit is proud to announce the “winners” of the Bad Internet Host of 2009 awards, alongside the definitive Top 50 Bad Hosts and Networks report. The findings are powered by the newly-created HE Index – a numerical representation of internet badness.

Download the report here.

The report comprises an exhaustive analysis of the Internet hosting industry (servers and Autonomous Systems) by the researchers at HostExploit, with community input and data from 16 authorative community sources. The result is a definitive list of the worst commercial servers around the globe, in terms of server badness. Detailed reports on each of the top 150 bad servers can be viewed on SiteVet.com.

The report analyses the wide range of crimes which affect all of our lives, and through the use of sophisticated math and our researchers’ vast experience, HostExploit has been able to produce what is perhaps the most definitive list to date and an easy-to-understand badness index. Beyond this, the report analyses the effects by country, the worst culprits within cybercrime categories (i.e. spam, malicious software, malware, botnet serving, Zeus, etc.), the attack vectors for specific cybercriminal activities and much more.

Legitimate businesses may wish to reconsider hosting a web site with a hosting service which has a high HE Index. In addition to supporting a hosting service that has a disproportionate amount of malicious activity, there is the risk of being blacklisted by having your web site on such a server.

However, it is not all bad news; part of the project also provides examples of the cleanest hosts around the world to demonstrate how such Internet badness can be avoided by commercial servers.

In providing this report, the emphasis was to review servers that could be considered medium to large scale commercial operations, with a few exceptions. The report highlights the issues which face the internet community due to the lack of accountability required of internet service providers whose servers are utilized for cybercrime.

This new report is available for a free PDF download at hostexploit.com – the producers of community reports exposing RBN (Russian Business Network), Atrivo, McColo and Real Host, and a foremost source of rogue and malicious network activity analysis on the Internet.