SEO attacks are especially successful during the holiday season

Apr 6, 2012 09:38 GMT  ·  By

With Easter approaching fast and everyone rushing to prepare all sorts of goodies and decorations for the holiday, it’s likely that Google and other popular services will get a lot of requests to search for “Easter eggs” and other related topics. Cybercrooks rely on this to launch their malware-serving campaigns.

Sophos experts found that when searching for “easter eggs + decorating tips easter secrets,” the first result users are presented with actually points to a website that pushes a piece of scareware called “Windows Care Taker.”

Windows Care Taker is a fake AV part of the family of rogue applications we’ve described a few days ago.

According to Sophos, a lot of .info sites are registered and cleverly set up to serve visitors with all sort of nasty elements.

“The reason why SEO attacks are successful, is that all of us tend to trust search engine results. After searching for something we happily click any of the links high up in the first page of results,” said Fraser Howard, principal virus researcher at SophosLabs.

Since the beginning of 2012, the number of SEO attacks has seen a constant growth, especially now that cybercriminals know what most users will be searching for.

So what can you do to protect yourself?

First of all, you can take a look at the name of the website you are about to be directed to, before clicking on the search engine result. If the name of the site has nothing to do with “Easter eggs”, it may mean that something malicious may be hiding on it.

However, this method is not foolproof, which is why it’s always best to rely on a decent antivirus product to protect you, at least against the more common threats.

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