It’s bad enough when regular sites get hijacked by people who want to fill your computer with all kinds of spyware and other assorted types of malware but when they start manipulating Google search results I think one could say things are getting out of control.
The team over at Sunbelt Software, developers of the Vipre security software , have a post up about just this fact . The way it works is that these malware serving sites are set up to use Google as a referrer and have massaged the served up links in search results to lead you directly to compromised sites.
Apparently one of the ways you can tell if the URL is dangerous is if you see a /?p or ?/t in it and while Google does seem to catch some of the dangerous links it doesn’t catch them all as you can see from this image courtesy of Sunbelt
The amount of search terms that can lead you into this dark world of dangerous search results is dizzying. While the security guys might like to think of it a a fun pass time it sin’t somethign for the average user to play around with.
Alex from the Sunbelt blog says that the use of search results like this is massive and points to a list of search terms used in a recent blackhat run on Google. This is only a potion of his whole list but it will give you an idea
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As they use to say on Hill Street Blues – be careful out there .
