ComputerWorld - Defensive Computing: Don't click that link, but if you do...

April 11, 2010
by Michael Horowitz

Here, briefly, are two more issues that belong in the non-existent User Guide to the Internet.

Issue one: You can't trust Google search results.

Any time an event or story becomes brutally popular, bad guys make customized malicious web pages and trick Google into displaying these bad web pages near the top of search results for the popular event or story.

This just happened with the Tiger Woods commercial where we hear the voice of his dead father talking to him.

Haven't seen the commercial? Be very careful doing a Google search for "tiger woods commercial".

The danger in this particular search was just documented by Lee Gaves of eSoft. According to his research, six of the top seven search results "lead to Fake Anti-Virus pages begging the user to install malicious software. The video results have also been poisoned to do the same." Six of the top seven*. Yikes.

What to do?

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