"If last November you googled one of thousands of innocuous and common
search terms, such as "Microsoft excel to access" or "how to teach your
dogs to fetch," you were in line for an Internet attack that infects
PCs with spam senders, password stealers, and other kinds of nasty
malware.
Beginning on November 24 and continuing for less than a week,
bad guys loaded up more than 40,000 Web pages with malicious software
and thousands of common search terms. They then employed an automated
network of malware-infected computers–known as a botnet–to link to
those sites in blog-comment spam and other places. The mentions
elevated the position of the poisoned sites in search results, often to
the first page.
The malicious sites had no useful information. Instead, a
simple click on a link to such a site in the search results was enough
to launch attacks against your PC. If the attack found any of a number
of vulnerabilities in a range of programs, it would load." – PCWorld
This is why I suspect search engines will move to a Digg based system (like wikipedia's beta search engine) and sole usage
of algorithms for site placement less and less. Sure you can hire people in china/elsewhere to be your click monkey
however this is much less effecient than simply utilizing SEO/blackhat SEO methods. Since we know this attack works it will
continue to be used until it becomes a massive issue. This affects just about every search engine not just google so don't
consider this a problem only google is dealing with. Consider this the first nail in the 'site algorithm only' coffin.
Article Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141796-c,onlinesecurity/article.html
