02 Mar 09 MALWARE TRICKING SEARCH ENGINES, AND YOU TOO (PC Magazine)

Both McAfee and Trend Micro are warning about a recent bump in the use of SEO (search engine optimization) abuse as a tool in the spread of malware.

Google Trends is a site that tracks the most popular search terms on Google. As I type here the most popular search is “obama budget“. This isn’t exactly new, but some outfits using the web to push malware are using Google Trends to find terms for their sites in order to get them into the searches of the most users possible.

Both Trend and Mcafee were tipped by a recent event in which searches on a Facebook worm called “Error Check System”. The worm was an interesting problem all by itself (the Trend Micro entry talks more about the worm, the Mcafee entry more about the SEO abuse), but what was really interesting is that if you Googled “Error Check System” you were pushed links to malware-infested sites. The recent GMail outage produced a similar problem; Googling “Gmail Down” got you lots of malware.

In all these cases, as with other recent attacks such as the eWEEK attack, the end result was to push rogue anti-malware to the user. This really does seem to the star of the malware world in that it directly brings in money.

Originally posted on the PCMag.com security blog, Security Watch.