Spam News

Web security firm warns of malicious search engines

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Cybercriminals are starting to create their own search engines to lead users to malicious pages, often created for distributing malware, according to a report from a major web security firm.

The new trend underlines how cybercrime is becoming increasingly professional - one malicious search engine detected by the firm has received approximately 195,000 visits.

Previously, security researchers have uncovered scareware social engineering tactics for attracting internet users with black hat SEO techniques. The cyber scammers create mailicious web pages using popular search terms.

In the newest upgrade to black hat SEO, the search engine itself sends users to malicious websites. According to the report, when users enter a search term, the engine returns just five or six results. Users that click on any of these results will redirect to a web page created specifically to distribute malware.

The pages include content such as pornographic videos. Users are prompted to download the latest version of "Web media player" in order to watch the clip. But the file downloaded is really the adware WebMediaPlayer.