November 30, 2007
Search Engines Unwary Bridge For Malware Attacks
Web search engines have unwarily become the bridge for malware attacks.
As Search Engine Journal and SunBelt Software put it: “Attackers are elevating the search result positioning of malware laced sites by populating web forms on large numbers of web sites with the malicious URLs. Using bots to accomplish the task, this elevates the rankings, meaning users unknowingly receive search results that may have Links to infected sites. After clicking the link they are attacked and infected with a large variety of attacks.”
An excerpt from the Search Engine Journal states:
Hundreds of legitimate search phrases have already been found to pull up Links near the top of the results listings that lead straight to the malicious sites. According to Sunbelt Software, they've already found 27 different domains, each containing up to 1,499 bad pages. That's about 40,000 potential pages, which is a pretty big number.
Actually, security threats are freely flowing on the Net. And search engines, which users frequent, are the watering hole of the Net. Once, web search engines are attacked, visitors won't be that safe anymore. Worse, if the problem becomes pervasive it could mean the end of search engines.
Now that the attacks have created a dent, what should you do? Make sure you have your AV and other operating system and updated browser malware software installed. Be wary. Remember threats are everywhere.
See article.
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