02 October 2008, 16:38

Hackers using Google Trends in social engineering

Hackers are writing fake blogs about real current events in an attempt to trick visitors into downloading trojans. According to security provider Webroot, cyber criminals have even begun to use Google Trends to determine the most popular search terms and then post relevant entries on their own or other, compromised, blogs. This increases the blog's ranking in Google and attracts more victims, says the security provider. The criminals' own web pages then offer visitors software such as alleged anti-spyware tools or trojan-infected video codecs to download.

Google Trends lists the most popular search terms and offers tables showing the number of times a certain term was requested within a day. The service has also started to offer the access figures of individual domains. To protect themselves against such attacks, users can take the standard measures for secure surfing: Engage brain, be wary of downloads offered, install virus scanners from known sources and always install any available updates for the browser and relevant plug-ins used.