Scareware Pushers Exploit New Multiple Sclerosis Treatment

A new black hat search engine optimization (BHSEO) campaign is poisoning search results related to a new oral drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), with malicious links.

A few days ago, a pharmaceutical company called Novartis announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Gilenya, a pill for treating relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis.

Gilenya is very important for people affected by this disease and their caregivers, because it is the first MS drug that can be administered orally.

However, it's worth noting that when the therapy was originally announced, it was called Gilenia (with an i). Threfore, a lot of people still know it by that name.

Security researchers from GFI Software (formerly Sunbelt) warn that searching for information about "Gilenia" on Google has a high chance of landing users on malicious pages.

For example, at the time of writing this article, four of the top five results for "Gilenia price" lead to scareware distribution websites. This is similar for "Gilenia cost" or "Gilenia side effects."

These pages have still not been blacklisted by Google's Safe Browsing service and don't bear the "This site may harm your computer" warning, which means the BHSEO campaign is new and very much active.

The term scareware refers to rogue applications, which pose as antivirus products and bombard users with fake security alerts about infections on their computers.

The purpose of these scams is to scare people into buying licenses for what are ultimately useless programs, that have no security benefit whatsoever.

Of course, the unfortunate users who fall for these tricks, not only part with their money, but also compromise their credit cards in the process.

As always, people are advised to keep their antivirus products up to date and Firefox users should consider installing the free Search Engine Security (SES) extension.