SEO Poisoning: The Trend Of Abusing Search Results Intensifies

After contaminating the search results on popular search engines such as Google and Bing, SEO poisoning is set to pose a threat to small and medium enterprises as well.

Users tend to trust the search results of major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alta Vista etc and use their services to reach out to their desired websites or access the information they are looking for. Cyber criminals have been using this trust of user in search engine results to exploit the vulnerabilities by using Black Hat search engine optimization techniques and poison search results of major search engines. This is also done by injecting IFRAME redirects into search results of major sites. The ominous trend has now intensified and expanding its footprints with malware and scareware authors mixing rogue search results with legitimate ones.

The attackers poison the search results of popular sites with their malicious web resources and with IFRAME code, redirect visitors to malicious websites. The redirect may send the users to servers that attempt to install fake antivirus product or cause him to simply land on a website that he never wished to.

Online attacker are even poisoning image and video results of search engines particularly Google, owing to its immense popularity and the trust the search giant commands across the globe. This attack, coupled with news items that interest the users, is a lethal combination. Conservative estimates put the loss due to these malicious attacks at anywhere between $ 105 million and $ 200 million, industry experts said.

SEO poisoning strives to hijack legitimate websites and use their strong reputation, so compromised websites will always be desirable from an attacker’s perspective in a Black Hat SEO campaign.

SEO poisoning is set to spread across the web with malicious malwares and scarewares but as the leading SEO Company India, We, at Profit By Search, keep patching all the possible vulnerabilities proactively so the business sites of our valued clients remain unaffected by this intensifying global phenomenon.