Search for Nike Ad of Tiger Woods May End Up in Serving Malware

Security researchers caution that search results for a latest Nike TV advertisement involving Tiger Woods have been instilled with harmful links.

Lately, following the 2010 Masters Golf Tournament, which marked the expected return of Tiger Woods, Nike came up with an emotional TV commercial featuring the golf star, wherein he is being questioned by the voice of his late father about his involvement in the cheating scandal.

The advertisement triggered the interest of many people, which is probably what Nike aimed at initially. But the intense Internet forums and blog discussions about the ad have made it a much-hyped topic in Google Search, making the topic an apt choice for pushing scareware.

The security experts added that with all events that produce a considerable amount of Internet traffic, hackers have chosen to circulate some more malware by means of poisoned search results.

Senior technical support engineer at eSoft, Lee Graves, stated that a user searching for the ad would likely search 'Tiger Woods Commercial', which is the heavily poisoned search. Out of the leading seven search results, six lead to forged antivirus pages asking the users to download harmful software. Further, the video results are also poisoned, as per the news published by SCMagazine on April 9, 2010.

As per eSoft, unfortunately, the scareware variant distributed through BHSEO (black hat search engine optimization) campaign is not even detected by several well known antivirus solutions.

Further, in this attack, the referring website is also significant. If the user does not belong to Google or presumably other search engines, he will be taken to cnn.com in place of the harmful site. eSoft has observed this method earlier also; however it is interesting that hackers have exploited CNN in this particular case.

Therefore, to avoid being attacked by such scams, users are advised to be careful of any search related to Woods, as these will also be at the target of hackers.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/21/2010