Hack the Planet

...Websense refers to this problem as: SEO Poisoning Attacks. The gist of the tactic is hackers manipulate search engine results to allow their 'poisoned' links to appear higher on result pages. Hackers are able to manipulate the results by trending up on hot keywords; Websense referenced these three in particular from 2009: MTV VMA awards, Google Wave invites, and Labor Day sales.

According to Websense's data, 13.7% of the sites/links on Google's hot/trending topics were of malicious intent. The future isn't looking any brighter, as they're projecting the problem to increase going into 2010.

An even greater problem than traditional search is the newly popular, 'real time results'. Gathered from social media platforms, these sites are a hotbed for malicious content. Twitter has been especially susceptible to spam tweets, and some even containing malware. This leads to problems in real time search, as there's no way to decide what's malware and what isn't. With Bing, Yahoo, and Google all jumping onto the real time search bandwagon, this is a problem which could pick up steam in 2010.

Even for reputable sites, malware is a problem. According to Websense, 71% of the malicious code out on the web was attached to already existing, well known sites. Hackers have also blended various forms of attack, to fool people easier. Malicious 'Free PC Scans' caught on during the second half of 2009. These programs would offer free scans, and allow you to purchase solutions for cleanup. What was really happening is the users were being linked to malicious sites where they were provided hackers credit card information. One of the most popular blended attacks occurred with 'Britney Murphy death' searches, that provided links to these fake scanning services.

I know all the SEO experts reading this are cringing at the idea of their craft being used to spread malware garbage across the internet. What we can learn from the situation is to continually be on our toes. Continued maintenance of websites, along with keyword upkeep can still go along way in combating these SEO poison attacks.

Good luck out there in 2010.

Tag: hackers, SEO

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