"Today’s aggressive and spooky abuse of trusted giants reveals just how
sophisticated and manipulative these guys have become. By following
Google Trends, and with some sharp SEO skills to take advantage of
Google’s famed real-time indexing, Scammers are directly targeting
Google’s search results, trusted by as many as 70 percent of Internet
searchers.
McAfee researcher Craig Schmugar
points to the recent Gmail outage as an example. When that happened,
many were searching for the cause or solution to the problem, and
Schumagar shows how a malicious link copying verbatim the top news
source text as a snippet, shows up fourth in the search rankings,
following highly recognizable and trusted sources like Google News,
Digg.com, and Mashable.
A subsequent link query found the domain linked to several other
trending topics: Quiznos (a free sub giveaway promotion), Sharon Stone
at the Oscars, Extreme Makeover foreclosure, Nicky Hilton, IHOP all you
can eat pancakes promotion. All of them obviously target what the
average searcher may be seeking.
That same malicious link—which led to a scareware prompt only if
arriving via a search engine (gibberish if you just enter it into a
browser, thereby masking the intent some)—was also found directly on
the Google Trends page for Ash Wednesday, which was yesterday.
“I do not recall any previous attacks abusing Google Trends this
aggressively,” said Schmugar. “The malicious links are being
distributed across numerous sites, targeting many high-profile search
terms, and the poisoned links are regularly appearing high up on Google
results pages.”
Read more: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/02/26/google-trends-seo-create-hacker-perfect-storm
