And You Thought Google Was Safe

[peter026]

Think you can rely on Google? Maybe not. Internet Security Researchers Sunbelt Software is reporting that hundreds of legitimate search phrases have been hijacked, with the top results taking the inadvertent user to web pages brimming with malware.

Sunbelt says that they have found forty thousand pages that show a potential risk in connection with this threat. It is not just the more technical searches that have been compromised. For example, ‘how to teach a dog to play fetch’ is listed by Sunbelt as a hijacked search phrase. It is suspected that flooding the comment areas of blogs with fake references has compromised certain phrases. Just to avoid totally terrifying you…the viruses and nasties found at the end of these searches are well known to anti-virus companies. If your security tools are up-to-date, then your PC should be safe, whatever is lurking on a web page. Hopefully, Google will get on the case and devise a strategy for defeating this latest threat, but in the meantime, you might want to be suspicious of search result URLs that are just a jumble of characters, ending with China's .cn top-level domain (for example: rtfrhhkdsf.cn/445.html).