Posted by Virus Bulletin on Nov 17, 2010
Hackers take the shine off Royal couple's news.
It will come as little surprise to those in the IT security industry to hear that within minutes of yesterday's announcement of the engagement of Prince William to Kate Middleton, links to malicious sites had started to appear in Google searches relating to the happy couple's news.
According to the Sunbelt blog a search for 'kate middleton' turned up a poisoned link suggesting the user should download a Firefox update - which of course was a trojan rather than a browser update.
Meanwhile, the Tech Herald reports that, the terms 'prince william engagement', 'kate middleton prince william', 'royal wedding prince william', and other similar variations, all turned up links to compromised sites.
Sophos researchers have also posted a video of a 'kate middleton'/'prince william' SEO attack which spreads fake anti-virus software.
A recent report by security firm Websense suggested that users are now more likely to encounter malicious search results when searching for emerging news stories than when surfing for porn, with 22.4% of all searches for current news leading to poisoned results. With the Royal engagement look set to remain firmly in the media's focus in the coming weeks and months, many more instances of search poisoning can be expected.
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Posted on 17 November 2010 by Virus Bulletin
