Security company Sophos released a study which reveals that Microsoft’s very own Bing service is the most poisoned search engine on the Internet.
Search engine poisoning is a malicious tactic used by online attackers that brings dangerous entries on the first page of search engines, most of them displayed for very popular keywords.
Since SophosLabs has a dedicated software solution aimed at this particular threat, it analyzed data collected from its app to determine the most poisoned search engine on the Internet.
It appears that Bing holds the biggest number of poisoned search results, with a share of 65 percent, according to
data revealed by Sophos. Google comes second with only 30 percent, while the other 5 percent goes to other search services out there.
Surprisingly, 92 percent of the poisoned links are aimed at image searches, while only 8 percent of them have been designed for text searches.
“Taking data from the last couple of weeks for search engine redirects blocked on our web appliance, it is clear that the majority of the redirects are affecting those using the Bing search engine,” Sophos said in a statement.
The easiest way to protect yourself and your data is to install a dedicated solution that can detect malicious links, but in the end, it all comes down to the user.
“The bottom line is that we are all guilty of trusting the results we get back, and clicking through without necessarily scrutinizing the URL as closely as we might,” Sophos concluded, recommending users to double-check every link displayed on the search engine results page.
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