Scammers abuse Google Trends to poison search results

Cyber crooks are using one of Google Inc.'s own tools to poison search results with links that spread fake security software, a researcher said Thursday. "Malware distributors have abused Google Trends before," said Craig Schmugar, a senior threat researcher with McAfee Inc. "But I've never seen them use it as aggressively as they are now."

Google Trends, a tool the search giant rolled out last June, highlights the most popular searches of the past hour. At mid-day Thursday, for instance, the No. 1 search phrase, according to Trends, was "Obama budget."

Scammers and malware makers are closely monitoring Google Trends to guide them in selecting search phrases and legitimate news content, which they then integrate into their own fly-by-night sites, said Schmugar. The idea is to "game" Google into ranking their malware-hosting sites near the top on scores of high-profile, current events-related search results.

"I'm not talking about just a few sites," Schmugar said. "I've collected a lot of them, with poisoned links [in Google search results] that are pretty high up, almost always in the top 10."

News accounts recently abused by hackers have ranged from this weekend's stories about a worm spreading on Facebook to the attack last week by a chimpanzee that left a Connecticut woman in critical condition, said Schmugar. "They're grabbing content from pages that are already popular," he said. "They grab content from those pages and put it on their own site."

More recently, Schmugar has monitored poisoned links ranked high on searches for "Gmail down," a reference to the two-and-a-half hour outage at Google's Web-based e-mail service on Tuesday.

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