Latest Google trend: Malicious sites
Monday, March 2, 2009
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of Google Trends as a way to dupe users interested in the top 100 popular search terms to click on malicious links, according to security provider.
The attack involves choosing a popular term and then building a malicious site containing the same content that appears legitimate. This allows the malicious link to be rated in Google's application.
Recently, security officials discovered malicious links within Google Trends on searches such as Ash Wednesday, Obama's address to Congress and the Gmail outage. If users click on the link, they are reportedly brought to a website that downloads a trojan called FakeAlert.
By peppering the machine with pop-up messages, the trojan attempts to convince the user into downloading software, for a fee, to have the seemingly threatening content removed from their computer.
Some security experts told SCMagainzeus.com they couldn't recall a previous attack that was so aggressive as this one.
Google told the news provider they were aware of the problem and indicated they were attempting to increase its web security.
"We'll continue to monitor for these bad results and will remove any as necessary. Additionally, we're always exploring new ways to identify and eliminate malicious sites from our index," said a Google spokesman.
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