Google Bucking the Trend?

The other day I blogged about Google Trends being abused to serve malware.  The attackers were not only targeting the most popular search terms, but also manipulating Google’s page rankings to appear high up on search results.  It appears that Google may have squashed those attacks, at least at the moment.

The pages that were coming up while searching Google seem to be purged from Google’s index.  The pages may still be found on other search engines, though not ranked as high.  This is also visible in stats I started gathering yesterday.

I took the top 100 search terms for each day of this week and ran a Google search on each term.  I then considered the top 10 search results for each term, looking for poisoned links with high rankings.  Admittedly it would have been better to gather the search results on each day, rather then running the test several days after the fact, but none the less the limited results do suggest that Google took some recent actions.

The following graph shows significant activity prior to mid-day yesterday.

We can assume the attackers will be looking at new and creative ways to circumvent any countermeasures that may be in place.

Search safe.