Scareware Purveyors Corrupt Online Search Returns Pertaining to Festival Cards

Investigators at Security Company GFI Sunbelt have issued an alert that a fresh BHSEO (Black Hat Search Engine Optimization) campaign has been launched that corrupts results with malevolent web-links, obtained from online searches pertaining to holiday cards.

Explain the investigators that people, during the upcoming vacation, are increasingly surfing on the Web to find greeting cards of various kinds they can dispatch remembering friends and family members. Cyber-criminals, particularly malware purveyors are quite aware of this, therefore like always they're preparing to capitalize on the situation and contaminate Internet users with their malevolent software.

Consequently, they are pushing malicious websites up on search engine results pertaining to specific search items by falsely raising the Google Page Rank of the same.

Warn the GFI investigators that search phrases having combinations of greeting cards, free, print, Christmas or Hanukkah presently bear a great possibility of taking Web-surfers onto scareware sites.

According to them, these sites imitate anti-virus scans as well as produce fake alerts to victims that malware has infected their PCs. Also, these usually present supposed security software that can be downloaded to clean the infection, but is actually bogus as also worthless.

Comment the GFI experts that the current malicious campaign has been doing the rounds since a while, and it is expected to stay. Indeed, disturbingly, scareware, which's an immense business for cyber-criminals, is encouraging crooks to set up elaborate commercial activities for spreading their scams like establishing multinational corporations, often altering names along with Web addresses, as well as providing customer service phone lines designed to actually deceive users.

Worryingly, GFI's claim about a booming scareware business has also received the support of McAfee another security company that released data during the end-week of October 2010, showing that scareware currently accounts for 23% of the entire malicious software being circulated online.

Said Communications and Research Analyst Tom Kelchner for GFI Software, several prominent vacations such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year were only weeks away, so it was expected that individual and company computer users would become vigilant while surfing on the Web. Sourcewire.com published this on November 3, 2010.

Related article: SecureWorks Identifies Bank and Information Stealing Trojan Coreflood

» SPAMfighter News - 11/15/2010