14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, Security company Sunbelt reported that an impressive malware-serving spam was started, targeting Google, Microsoft and Yahoo SERPs. That's right, the spam results were affecting the most popular search engines on the web, aiming to deploy malware files on users' computers. Today, Lisa Vaas from "eWeek" wrote that Google's and Microsoft's pages are clean, but Yahoo's results are still infected with the malicious pages. Usually, the results are included among the first links provided for common searches, in a move meant to lure visitors on the websites and to install dangerous tools on their systems.
As I have said, the issue was first reported by Sunbelt, which also informed the affected companies about the malicious results. Although Google and Microsoft have removed the majority of malware-infected pages, the Sunnyvale super giant Yahoo is still struggling to deal with them.
"I can find thousands of domains serving malware in a matter of seconds with very simple and legitimate searches done through Yahoo search", Francesco Benedini of Sunbelt told "eWeek". "Google had more mess to clean up in the first place. I don't recall Yahoo ever being particularly efficient in cleaning up results from 'bad' domains; most of the ones I showed in the .info [top-level domain] are months old, and have been serving malware for months."
In case you didn't read the news, most websites were hosted in China and were published on newly registered domains created especially for malicious attempts. Moreover, every time a visitor clicked on such a link, he was redirected to an infected website attempting to install fake codecs or security solutions on the user's computer. Downloading the utilities, provided by these websites, meant compromising your system and providing the attackers with access or other private information stored on your system.