How safe is your seach engine?

Crackers are increasingly attempting to influence the behavior of search engines to get them to misdirect users to malicious sites says security firm Marshal.

Unknowing users are asked to download an anti-malware application to protect their computers. The malware program then installs it’s malicious code onto the users computer.

Microsoft has attempted to help users with it’s Internet Explorer browser by using what they call a Smartscreen filter. The filter scans servers that have downloads to determine if those servers have a history of giving out malicious content. It if does the user is warned that they may be on a malicious web site.

Crackers also add links to bad websites in the comments. Posting links to such sites is known as blog spamming. When a user goes to one of these sites the cracker has automated tools that help gain entry into the users computer.

Unfortunately there is no firewall rule to prevent the foolishness of people visiting such sites. Once they are there bad things happen. Updated browsers, proxy servers and black and white lists certainly help. Still the best prevention for eliminating problems is educating users what to avoid along with the aforementioned methods.

-j