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Craig Schmugar

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McAfee Labs :

Google Trends Suffering Abuse Today

Friday, September 11, 2009 at 3:31pm by Craig Schmugar
Craig Schmugar

Wouldn’t you know it. Just the other day I blogged about rogue anti-virus software makers selectively targeting certain hot search terms. Since then the majority of top terms lead to poisoned links within the top 10-20 search results.

Recently there have been some news stories about attackers targeting specific topics or terms, but from what I’m seeing they are pretty indiscriminate. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. If people are searching for it, then the bad guys want to poison the results. The speed at which these links appear suggests the operation is largely automated. 

Here’s one example for bengals blackout. One potential way of identifying a bad link is if the title is exactly the same as search term, it’s in all-capital letters, and the URL contains the search terms as well. The summary usually contains the text you’d expect to find from a news story. This is not a foolproof way to call something bad, but it’s a strong indication that something might be fishy.

Search safe.

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Comments (1)

  • Michael September 15, 2009 4:54AM

    Is this something that say, Site Advisor would keep up with? I can’t imagine how a company with mitigate this in an environment with unsavvy users.

    Reply