Giant black-hat SEO campaign funnels victims to scareware sites
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Security researchers say that cyber criminals have conducted a large-scale campaign to influence Google results, pushing malware-spreading sites higher on the list and dropping legitimate results to the bottom.
Online security researcher Cyveillance, in a blog post from earlier this week, says that the black-hat SEO perpetrators posted masses of blog posts on free services, blank but for a picture, and carefully optimized to appear at the top of numerous esoteric Google search queries.
These "lure" websites, if accessed, redirect users first to what Cyveillance describes as a "middleman" site - active long enough to perform redirects, but not long enough to be catalogued as malicious - and then on to the malicious website itself, which performs a now-standard scareware attack on the victim's PC.
The exploit, which is only present on certain outdated versions of server software, suggests that it can be blocked by the use of fully patched and up-to-date programs. This exploit is not the only one driving traffic to scareware sites, as recent malvertising and spam attacks have also showed.
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