Malware Wxploits Google

March 2009

Malware distributors are taking advantage of Google Trends to earn top billing for their pages, according to security experts. Researchers at McAfee’s Avert Labs said that a number of malicious pages have seen their Trend ranking artificially enhanced so that the pages will be returned as top results for a number of Google searches. The McAfee senior threat researcher said that the malware writers appear to be using the Google service to find the most popular current search topics, then loading the pages with keywords and text to show up on result pages for those terms.” One thing they are doing is to pull the content off the pages that are already ranked high, which makes it a little more transparent when you see the search results,” said the researcher. After clicking on one of the malicious links, the user is redirected to a page which will attempt to exploit a three-year old vulnerability in Internet Explorer, as well as a number of fake ‘alert’ pop-ups designed to trick the user into installing rogue security software. The researcher suggests that users exercise extra caution when clicking on search results and avoid following links to unknown or suspicious domains.