Scammers peddling rogue security products have apparently mastered search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in order to move their malicious sites to the top of the list when users search for top news stories.
The rapid rise of malicious URLs in search results during the recent flurry of news stories about the Samoa earthquake and tsunami drew the attention of Roger Thompson, chief research officer for anti-virus specialists AVG.
Thompson said “When we looked, we found [attackers] had five or six of the top ten results on the Google search results page, well above even places like CNN and The Guardian on queries like Samoan Tsunami.
This is growing larger on the threat landscape. It means we’ll all need to look twice at URLs when we search for current news topics and keep in mind the possibility of malicious links even from the big search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Story here.
Tom Kelchner