Sophos Research Report Sample

While older approaches such as email remain a threat, fake anti-virus and other malware are largely spread through the web. The search engine is our gateway to the web, and cyber crooks are skilled at manipulating search results from the engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! to lure victims to their malicious pages. These pages host security risks and browser exploits just waiting to infect users who are directed to these sites. There’s also the abuse of legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Legitimate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are regularly used as marketing tools, but when SEO is abused by the bad guys, and supplemented by more devious methods, it’s known as Black Hat SEO.

With Black Hat SEO attacks—known as “SEO poisoning”—search engine results are poisoned to drive user traffic to the rogue site. Google reported that up to 1.3% of their search results are infected. So, with SEO poisoning, you’re directed to a bad page through a poisoned search. Once a victim is lured to the desired webpage, they’re redirected to these rogue or poisoned sites. On these sites, cybercriminals infect users’ machines with malware or push fake goods and service to users while attempting to steal personal information.