Headline PH: How Google Helps Hackers (Accidentally)

Because of Google's large market share in the Internet search engine business, hackers developed a vested interest in ensuring that their attacks are effective in poisoning Google results, according to software company Symantec.

"Google's breadth and speed of indexing also play a role," added Symantec, a company involved in providing security, storage and systems management solutions.

Symantec reported that search engine results poisoned with links to fake antivirus software have been a constant problem for Internet users. However, it is an effective way for cyber attackers to infect users' machines.

Based on Symantec's report on "Rogue Security Software" -- the culprits of these "toxic" search results are typically scam perpetrators who use a range of black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to poison search engine results and increase the ranking of their scam websites on search engine indexes. A rogue security software program is a misleading application that pretends to be legitimate security software, but provides the user with little or no protection. In some cases, it actually facilitates the installation of malicious code that it claims to protect against.

Symantec has observed search results constantly and generated statistics on the top search trends every hour and determined how many were malicious (within the first 70 Google search results).

Tom S. Noda,
computerworld.com.ph

You might also like this: