If you want to be a pathetic, bottom feeding cybercriminal, just check Google’s Trend site to monitor what the public is interested in and poison the search results. What does that mean? It means infecting pages containing the key words people search on with malware so when unsuspecting victims click on the result in their Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo or other search results, they’ll end up with more than the information they were looking for. We saw this most recently with the Haiti earthquake disaster,and today the cyberscum are using the upcoming 2010 Super Bowl to trick us.
If you were to use popular search terms such as “Super Bowl 2010 Score” or “Super Bowl 2010 Line”, you would find more than 23 dangerous websites popping up in the first 100 results for each (26 and 23 respectively). Oddities such as “2010 Orange Bowl Halftime Show” contain even more with 38 dangerous sites in the first 100 results. Given that the Orange Bowl took place in early January, I suspect cybercriminals just imitate each other and copy and increase their efforts to add more infected sites, even for events long past.
I have Norton Internet Security installed on my computer and it includes a service called “Norton Safe Web”. The benefit of this service when it comes to poisoned search results is that all the results in my search efforts are color coded to keep me safe from clicking on dangerous sites. Known safe sites have a green circle with a check mark in it. Known bad sites have a red circle with an “x” through it. You can click on the icon to learn more about the threats found on those sites (keystroke loggers, malware, viruses, etc.) And not yet validated sites have grey question marks and so forth. It really makes it much easier for the average consumer to stay safe from these variable threats that pop up and change with the trends and the day’s events.