Malware, (malicious software,) is the despicable weapon of choice for many dark headwear sporting cronies lurking in the shadowy backstreets just off the sparkling silicon avenues that map the web. These evil sub humans live to steal your personal details online to use for their own devices and for them a great source of innocent victims can be found over at the local search engine.
The world’s largest personal computer security software company, Symantec, recently published a press release highlighting a study by Norton which found that when you search for any of a number of trendy topics in a search engine, the results produced will in most cases include a high proportion of hits which lead to you to sites containing malware.
“The Norton study monitored a major search engine’s top 300 trending search terms and analyzed the top 30,000 search results daily for SEO poisoning over a three-month period, between February and May 2010. The search topics ran the gamut from sporting events to song lyrics to breaking news on criminal cases. Using unethical techniques to “game” search engine algorithms, hackers are poisoning search results, taking advantage of spikes in a topic’s popularity to redirect computer users to misleading applications such as fake antivirus scanners. Some days, more than 250 of the top 300 daily search terms returned more than 10 percent malicious links within the first 100 results.”
Cloud computing firm Zscaler have released a free Firefox add-on which masks page requests from Google, Bing and Yahoo which they claim reduces the risk of you clicking on a malicious link. What the tool does is change the HTTP referrer header when the search engine sends a page request through a link so that the potential malware encrusted site doesn’t know that the page request is coming from a search engine. The idea is that they will only return bad links if they know the request is coming from a search engine.
You can choose which search engines you want to mask in add-on’s options menu, as well as inserting the URLs of any site you know you can trust.
So basically the Search Engine Security tool hides the fact that you are using a search engine from the sites you request a page from by clicking a link on a search engine results page, protecting you against Blackhat spam SEO. While this appears to be a great tool, you shouldn’t rely on just one tool for your security.
For more information on Blackhat techniques and how they are evil like the darkside, check out another recent Cozy Digital post.
- Search The Human Body With Google Body Browser - December 21, 2010
- Has This Site Been Hacked? - December 20, 2010
- How Do Twitter & Facebook’s 2010 Trends Compare With Google’s? - December 14, 2010
- Google Zeitgeist 2010: What Have You Been Searching For Planet Earth? - December 10, 2010
- Google Chrome Gets Store And Talks Chrome OS - December 8, 2010
- Google Issues Security Email For Website Optimiser - December 7, 2010
- Google Launches AdWords Global Market Finder - December 7, 2010
- New Android Phone Promises A Pure Experience - December 7, 2010
- Google AdWords Wants Your Products! - December 3, 2010
- Know How Mobile Internet Affects Your Website? Google Analytics does… - December 2, 2010
You may also be interested in:
- Google On The Lookout for Malicious ‘Anti-Virus’ Software We look at a worrying trend in malicious fake anti-virus software and detail some tips to keeping you safe....
- WordPress Security – Essential Top Tips To Protect Your Blog! Want to guard your blog against hacking? Read on… ...
- Google Issues Security Email For Website Optimiser Update to on-site code required... ...
- Is The UK Waking Up To Online Security? A recent Ofcom report shows that people may becoming more internet security savvy....
- Ramsay’s Web Wire – Issue #26: Internet Security goes to the Blogs Internet security's taken a bit of a bruising this week as Android users get scammed and black hat SEO's are...
Cozy Digital is an