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David Marcus

David Marcus
Director, Security Research
Dave Marcus currently serves as Director of Security Research for McAfee® Labs, focusing on bringing McAfee’s ...

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McAfee Labs :

Valentine's Day Searches Lead to Malware

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 9:11am by David Marcus
David Marcus

5, 4, 3, 2, 1…malware!

It’s like clockwork, ain’t it? A popular holiday–such as Valentine’s Day–approaches and malware authors and cybercriminals ready for it.

I have done some Valentine’s Day searches for poisoned terms and found some nasty ones very quickly. Screensavers and ecards are always popular:

Valentine ScreenSavers

Valentine eCards

Even Rolex watches on Valentine’s Day are not safe:

Valentine Rolex

Some of the poisoned terms I have seen today:

Valentine’s Day Screensavers
Valentine’s Day Downloads
Valentine’s Day Wallpaper
Valentine’s Day Rolex
Valentine’s Day eCards
Animated Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day Greetings
Valentine’s Day Cupids
Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas

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Comments (1)

  • Barry Suskind February 23, 2010 6:13AM

    It goes deeper than what you state here and SiteAdvisor may not save you or provide the valuable “X” to tell you to stay away. I have seen instances where SiteAdvisor has “check” next to a site returned from a search, but clicking on that link yields malware. If you go to the site directly, you find nothing. I use WGET to try and trap the malware, but this will also yield nothing. The links are browser aware and trigger only for IE. The links also seem to use obfuscation in the URL with a long link and a redirect. Google must be watching these because after 8 hours or so, the links disappear and you can’t find them again. I’ve reported sites to SiteAdvisor (I’m a reviewer), but can’t really determine if the site was hacked, has some severe weakness or there is something in how Google produces links when you search that can be modified.

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