Search Engine Corruption Identified Greatest E-Threat

Web security vendor Blue Coat System Inc, just published its Mid-Year Security Report for 2011 according to which, the newly-released malicious program for search engine corruption is proliferating widely. MarketWatch published this on July 6, 2011.

Currently i.e. at the present time of 2011, "Search Engine Poisoning" is the greatest e-threat delivery technique, according to the report. In fact, image searches are now more widely corrupted in comparison to text searches for the delivery of malware. Cyber-criminals are using pirated games and movies as also porn as the most popular baits since these new devices supply an increased variety of entertainment to users.

States the report, by establishing untainted names within ad-connectivity as also serving varieties of malware, it becomes easy to build trusted and valuable status for cyber-crime in web-advertising systems prior to unleashing scams that turn out pretty effective.

Further, as per the report, during H1-2011, the most popular network for delivering malware was Shnakule which was both huge in size and significant in efficacy. The network had a mean of 2,000 distinct host names daily, while at the peak the number was over 4,300 daily. Moreover, it turned out as the most proficiently skilled in enticing end-users when over 21,000 requests emerged on average and a high of 51,000 requests in just 24-hrs.

Shnakule, which's one widely-used network for delivering malware, carries out malevolent tasks such as launching drive-by downloads; distributing bogus codecs and anti-virus, bogus warez, phony Firefox and flash updates; and operating command-and-control servers or botnets. Other activities of inter-related nature comprise gambling, pornography, work-from-home scams, link farming and pharma spam.

Importantly, Blue Coat cautioned that organizations often permitted malware-hosting activities that were largely found within software downloads and online storage; consequently, merely one lone defense like anti-virus software or a firewall wasn't any longer sufficient for safeguarding against malware networks and dynamic threats.

Stated senior vice-president and chief marketing officer Steve Daheb at Blue Coat, malware through the Web had gotten extremely dynamic so much so that every user could hardly be protected from each fresh assault using conventional defenses. ZDNet published this on July 6, 2011.

Related article: Surge in Spam attack

» SPAMfighter News - 7/13/2011