At Norton we try to help users steer clear of dangerous websites hosting malware. We’ve built in safety features in our security products, offer plug-ins to popular search engines and web browsers and even present color-coded alerts in those search results. (see image)
Still, with cybercriminals using poisoned search results and tweaking the search terms to trick innocent users into visiting their sites, we can all use more help in this area. “Poisoned search results”? If that term doesn’t ring a bell, it means that certain popular terms or phrases used in top searches attract the attention of cybercriminals. They know if lots of us are searching for (as an example) “Justin Bieber” sites, they can gain access to more computers by adding “Justin Bieber” search terms to their infected pages. They may hijack pages on legitimate websites that failed to secure all their servers or they may set up “insta-pages” created in a flash to trick users into a visit. Simply by visiting a malware-infested site, you may pick-up a “drive-by download” and have malware installed on your computer.
Google is working to help both the owners of these infected sites and potential visitors by adding alerts about possible malware right in the search results.
As seen in this example provided by Google, the alerts appear in a different shade of blue. What might work a bit better would be a stronger color choice since it doesn’t stand out enough and should possibly have an icon to help the user recognize the danger. I offer as an example, the method Norton uses, with color coded red circles with x’s in them for dangerous sites you shouldn’t visit, green circles with check marks for safe sites and grey circles for unknown or questionable sites. The example above shows what happens when I searched on a site that was recently reported to our Norton Safe Web site as hosting malware.
In a related issue, every year we summarize the trends in search terms used by children whose computers are protected with Norton Online Family. Last year one of the oddities was how frequently children use search engines to find well known websites instead of typing web addresses. Assuming we don’t see any change in that behavior this year, it proves the importance of building safety measures into search results to protect our kids, our computers and our information from being accessed by cybercriminals.