Search Term “Bearshare” on Google Leads to Malware

According to McAfee's security researchers, Internet users who search for "Bearshare" on Google are on the verge of finding themselves downloading malicious software on their systems as compared to others who use other term to search. ""Bearshare" is a famous peer-to-peer file sharing service.

Of all the results observed on search for Bearshare, around 50% redirects a user to a malicious site. "Screensavers" is the term following closely after "Bearshare", leading to a complete 42% of the resulting websites being unsafe, further resulting in malware.

McAfee also observed that common opinions that looking out for free music downloads or adult content will result in viruses more than searching for other things are false because of the increased authenticity of presence of both the industries on the Web.

According to the MacAfee, just 9% of adult websites results in malware, while around 20% of the digital music websites lead to computer viruses.

Experts said that once pornography used to lead to computer viruses compared to any other thing on the Web. However, as now most adult websites highly earn from authentic subscriptions and advertisements, infected websites have lessened.

Experts, while describing the technique used by cyber criminals, said that these crooks spot the search terms which are very popular among users, make out which of these terms will most likely attract suitable targets, and then optimized pages search engines such as Google and Bing show their results on first page. These results are mixed in between the non-malicious pages which users actually required to find. This method is termed "SEO Poisoning".

Counterfeit anti-virus programs have today become such a big problem just because of this practice of SEO Poisoning. For example, if one is searching on the Web for "XP antivirus", then he/she is most likely looking forward for AVG or Avast. However, the user could rather end up landing onto a malicious website selling XP Antivirus malware, or simply one among thousands of variants).

Recently, search terms associated with FIFA World Cup, NCAA Basketball Tournament, IPL, and Oscars were also under attack in similar manner, landing users onto the malevolent Web sites, user ultimately downloads malware.

Web users are therefore suggested to use up-to-date firewalls and anti-virus programs to be protected from such a threat.

Related article: Surge in Spam attack

» SPAMfighter News - 4/2/2010