Be careful what you search for
By Bradley Anstis, Marshal8e6
While search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming one of the must do’s for companies that are trying to improve theirsite ranking in search engines like Google and Yahoo, it’s also increasingly becoming a trick of the trade for spammers and malware authors looking to drive traffic to their own infected websites or websites they might have hacked with their malware.
Like any owner of a website, criminals are interested in directing as much traffic as possible to their pages in order to distribute content and increase potential profits. Of course, in their case, the content that they are pushing is malware that aims to use their unsuspecting victim’s computer to send spam, launch denial of service attacks or steal valuable information from other users, such as online banking passwords and credit card numbers. The financial goals are nothing new, but the technique shows the growing sophistication of the spammer and malware author community.
