Zscaler researcher Umesh Wanve posted a blog about Google searches that are still being hounded with links that appear in the top 10 links on a given search but which lead to infected websites. This time, search terms with Winter Solstice in them (Winter Solstice was yesterday. Dec. 21.) had high rankings. In fact, in Umesh's post, the 3rd and 5th most popular sites ranked and listed by Google were malicious.
research.zscaler.com

Zscaler's Mike Gaide talked about the ability of the bad guys to quickly establish bogus, infected sites within hours of a topic becoming popular such as unknown traveler Tom Stuker's interview on Fox News this past Sunday about flying 700,000 miles in 2009. Not long after that interview, all the top links on searches for Tom Stuker led to infected sites. Mike Gaide's blog post on that is here:
research.zscaler.com

Mike Gaide, researcher for Zscaler said:

"Given the speed at which these search terms are poisoned, it is likely that the hackers may have bots monitoring popular media feeds for names / key-phrases that folks are likely to Google ... This type of leveraging of the media as a decision-based feed for automation reminds me of the fictional book Daemon. Other members in the security industry have taken recent notice to these rapid SEO attacks as well: Brittany Murphy via f-secure.com and Beware of bad Google search results."

As Christmas approaches, and searches for things like Christmas dinner, Christmas music, heartburn, and a myriad of other topics start appearing, the odds are good that bad guys trying to make money will be busy creating bogus sites rather than enjoying the holiday spirit.

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