Internet fraudsters use the disaster as an opportunity to push links to fake antivirus software sites, warns Symantec Asia Pacific SMB director Steve Martin.In some cases, headlines appear in search results that look like legitimate news stories, but are
Internet fraudsters use the disaster as an opportunity to push links to fake antivirus software sites, warns Symantec Asia Pacific SMB director Steve Martin.
In some cases, headlines appear in search results that look like legitimate news stories, but are tied to bogus links to malicious sites.
Clicking on these "poisoned" search results could infect a user’s PC and result in exposing personal information to cybercriminals, said Mr Martin.
The scammers post an article with a read headline, byline and text (in the example below, from the NZ Herald) on one of their sites.
They then use so-called 'black-hat" search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to make their site appear high-up in Google search results about the quake.
The poisoned search results often have an obviously bogus URL (web address), as in the example below. All major security software companies' offer protection against malicious links - as do browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Symantec's Norton division offers Safe Web Lite (pictured below), a free tool that identifies risky links before you click on them.
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A recent by Symantec's Norton division monitored a major search engine's top 300 trending search terms and analysed the top 30,000 search results daily for SEO poisoning. Some days, more than 250 of the top 300 daily search terms returned more than 10% malicious links within the first 100 results.
According to Symantec’s Report on Rogue Security Software, the culprits of these “toxic” search results are typically scam perpetrators who use a range of SEO techniques to poison search engine results and increase the ranking of their scam websites on search engine indexes.
A rogue security software programme 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.
Included are photos showing examples of Norton Safe Web Lite, a free downloadable tool that identifies risky sites before users click on them in search results, searches for quake related news.
