90% Malicious Results for Searching Tri Energy on Google

According to Zscaler, a cloud security company, some Google searches lately displayed the results which contained 90% malicious links, and to perform such a nasty activity, spammers are using Google Trend.

The security company cites the search for a particular phrase, namely "tri energy," which was the most hunted term on Google Trends on April 2, 2010. When Zscaler checked for the first time, it found that among the 100 search results, 90 were malicious, with 86 of them redirecting Web-surfers onto a fake anti-virus site attempting to install malware.

Aside this, Google exhibited an alert Web-page for four malevolent links. Nevertheless, the first five Web-links from among the results were genuine.

Significantly, according to Zscaler, search engine giant Google's competitor Bing produced different results that were free of malicious Web-links. Also, Yahoo returned merely 4 malicious Web-links on the 2nd, 6th and 7th pages of the results. The security company isn't certain if Google and Bing search engines are more effective in blocking malicious search results, or aren't fast enough to allow new websites.

Additionally, Zscaler points out that following a repeat check of the search returns after an 8-hour period, there continued to be 90 malicious returns. However, Google had displayed an alert on 87 of those returns. Here, the security researchers question that if so many malevolent websites are returned from the particular search then what makes Google allow them on the result pages in the first place.

Answering that, Google explains that as cyber-criminals develop new spiteful websites, it is very usual for them to compromise legitimate sites and subsequently begin serving malware through those compromised websites.

In the meantime, remarking about this, Zscaler's researchers stated that while the current total number of malicious Web-links might be excessive in the given instance, the general issue of criminals abusing SEO optimization is very common.

According to Google Trends, it is not unusual to have malicious Web-links in 15-20% results from among the first 100 on Google search engine for a highly hunted phrase. If Google is not serious about the problem of Blackhat SEO poisoning, then malicious Web-links will, for sure, increase greatly in number, something that probably had already started.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 4/15/2010