Google Takes Down Highly Ranked Malicious Websites

Recently, it has been reported that Google had taken down several webpages that were believed to be manipulating the functions of the search engine to unleash malware attacks.

On this matter, Craig Schmugar, McAfee senior threat researcher, announced that, by Friday evening, US time, the company recorded a huge decrease in the number of the malicious webpages that were listed in the queries performed on Google Trends.

Last week, Schmugar announced that malware developers had begun to search the website of Google Trends in an attempt to identify the most popular search terms, and subsequently started to create malicious pages that would rank very highly when a related search was conducted. The logical consequence was that the most popular search queries on Google led users to sites with a high risk of malware infection.

Nevertheless, by Saturday morning, UK time, the number of such infected search returns had decreased considerably. “It appears that Google may have squashed those attacks, at least at the moment,” Schmugar stated. “The pages that were coming up while searching Google seem to be purged from Google's index.”

This statement was later confirmed by one of Google's spokespersons, who declared that the respective pages had indeed been removed from the search engine's index. However, it was emphasized that this issue was in fact a global problem since Google was not the only one affected by the infected sites – they are and will remain part of the general web and everyone is a potential victim.

In addition, the spokesperson reported that the company would continue its endeavor in detecting and removing any fake results that affect the accuracy of the search engine. This can be achieved by developing new methods of identifying all malicious pages from the Google index. “We will continue to monitor for these bad results and will remove any as necessary. We are always exploring new ways to identify and eliminate malicious sites from our index.”