How will you know when your dabbling in pharmaceutical spam and affiliate marketing hi jinks have truly poisoned your soul and stolen the last shreds of humanity you had left? Well, probably around the time that you find yourself taking advantage of public sentiment for the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform to push rogue antivirus malware and pornography.
And that’s apparently a place that some folks out there have already gone to, at least according to the latest post from Web security firm Websense, which reports that search terms like “veterans day,” “veteran’s day 2010,” and “veterans day events” are turning up a high number of malicious Web sites in the results.
The code being pushed by the malicious sites is similar to that pushed a few weeks back around the U.S. midterm elections, when sites pushing rogue AV were found being served up in search results for election-related terms, and there’s evidence that these attacks were carried out merely by swapping the election-related keywords with those relating to Veterans Day.
Websense also found that cyber criminals were using poisoned image searches around Veterans’ Day terms to redirect Web surfers to sites that will push rogue antivirus software, as well as advertise links to pornography sites.
Websense recently released its 2010 Threat Report which found, among other things, that search engine optimization -based attacks are on the rise. SEO-related malware Web sites showed up in almost a quarter of all search results, according to the Websense report.
