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Third of trending search topics return poisoned results - Norton study |
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A new Norton study has found that over one in three of the top-trending search terms returned at least 10 percent malicious results, exposing netizen's computers and personal information to the risk of cybercrime.  Norton says between February and May this year, malicious results were rampant while searching for trending topics such as “tropical dreams sweepstakes” or “red hot laugh riot”, which at the peak of their popularity returned a staggering 99 malicious links out of the first 100 results. This week, celebrity news, online gaming and diseases were among the most poisoned top-trending topics, with terms such as “constance francesca hilton,” “atomic dove” and “melorheostosis” returning more than 45 percent malicious links out of the first 100 results.The Norton study monitored a major search engine’s top 300 trending search terms and analyzed the top 30,000 search results daily for SEO poisoning over a three-month period, between February and May 2010. The search topics ran the gamut from sporting events to song lyrics to breaking news on criminal cases. Using unethical techniques to “game” search engine algorithms, hackers are poisoning search results, taking advantage of spikes in a topic’s popularity to redirect computer users to misleading applications such as fake antivirus scanners. Norton has brought out its own tool to protect against these poisoned search engine optimization (SEO) threats, which work with either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. |
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