Halloween-Themed Black hat SEO have Begun

Though Halloween still has a few weeks to go, but online crooks are fully charged with new scams aimed at trapping users and infecting hacking of computers.

Websense Researchers found one scam related to black hat internet search engine optimization in which malware creators are spreading a rigged Web page known as "Free Halloween skeleton templates."

"Halloween skeleton templates" is a trick known as "Blackhat SEO" or "Poisoned SEO". The hackers tampered with Google's search engine fake page which brings up an infected link and redirects users to appear to be a phony YouTube site.

As a strategy, the fake YouTube site uses bare images of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Emma Watson. Along with exciting captions, these intended to lure users into playing the apparent video. Further, the poisoned page attacks visitors with a phony Adobe Flash Player update.

In order to see these nude pictures, the poisoned page attacks visitors with a forged Adobe Flash Player update.

Users who got carried away by the scam and clicks on "Download Now" button do not see the picture and expect the reward they wished for. All they get is a harmful Trojan known as "scandsk.exe" left silently on their systems.

Though it is not clear what the malicious payload Trojan carries users can be very well sure of the harmful effects on the private data stored the computer.

As per the security experts, Google has made crucial efforts in detecting the black hat SEO campaigns and to some extent it proved successful too. The problem is not that bad as it was a year ago, but attacks like these are an indication that the threat exists.

Researchers claimed that Halloween-themed attacks will increase in the near future as holiday approaches and poisoned search results are not the only threat users should be careful about. This is not a latest trick, but its persistent use in social engineering scams indicates that it still has a high success rate.

Further, they added that users should install an update version of anti-virus software and must be careful of any website that urges them to download anything.

Related article: Halloween Spam Luring to Snatch Away Private Data

» SPAMfighter News - 10/19/2011