Hackers hijack web search results
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Hackers hijack web search results
By Mark Ward © BBC MMVII
A huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted. The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as “Christmas gifts” and “hospice”.
Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered. The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information.
The criminals who bought the domains convinced the indexing software used by Google, MSN and Yahoo they were good and popular sources of informationy. They accomplished this using comment spam on blogs to push the pages up the search index rankings.
The booby-trapped websites were thought to be in operation for about 24 hours before Google began stripping them out of its search index. Some of the trapped websites are believed to be still turning up in searches carried out on Yahoo and MSN Live.
This attack was likely to be a harbinger of many more.