Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attacks are increasing rapidly

One has to be very careful when using search engine for looking for information or news on the latest hot topics. There are more chances of getting malware infection after visiting the websites listed in the results.

Malware authors are creating more and more webpages which are loaded with newly created malwares, fake softwares, roguewares. These webpages contains hundreds of most searched words on search engine. This improves chance of their infected web page getting listed on the search engine. These keywords are mostly of latest hot topics which increases the chance their link getting listed on first page of the search result. This technique is called as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) poisoning. There is more to this as SEO poisoning also involves exploiting the weakness in the way search engines are implemented. This way the hackers make sure their webpage links get listed immediately on first page.

Recent observations indicated SEO poisoning attempts on popular topics like, American Idol Winners, Tiger Woods confession, Olympic Games news, iPad related news. Search results of these hot topic had at least few links to the malicious webpages on the day they were most searched. Users who visit these infected pages had to face problems of scareware getting installed in the system which later try to make user pay for the services they used. And I guess everybody knows where this money goes.