Web Security News

Can search engines keep up with blackhat SEO?

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Microsoft's newly released search tool Bing has features similar to other search engines for blocking malicious websites, although cybercriminals using blackhat SEO tactics for poisoning search results are still getting around defenses.

Microsoft said Bing uses drive-by-download detection to warn users with pop-up warnings and manually blocks known phishing and malware sites from showing up in the search results, according to a report from eWeek.com.

However, Microsoft did not say much on how they are working to prevent hackers from poisoning search engine results - they are "continuing to work on improving their technology," according to eWeek.com.

Google has set up similar systems for its search engine to seek out malicious sites and, like Bing, the search engine labels them with a warning to users. Google publishes lists of potentially dangerous sites for browsers to avoid.

Blackhat SEO tactics by the cybercriminals turn out new malicious links based on whatever is popular at the moment.

Web security researchers at PandaLabs searching for popular terms on Google found thousands of malicious links related to current news topics, including 10,500 links targeting "France" due to the recent Air France calamity.

A recent report by McAfee identified search terms that presented the most risk for turning up malicious sites, with popular song lyrics, free music downloads and video game cheats being among the most risky.
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