SEO Spreads Risk

This topic has been discussed quite a bit lately, by almost all the major security vendors, but we really haven't talked about it here on this forum, and it's probably a good time to remind everyone that one of the newest forms of attacks in the web space is around poisoning the search results from Google, basically using Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to get infected web pages highly ranked in search results, especially around current topics that are high interest (recently the Haiti Earthquake, the iPad announcement, Toyota's recall, and President Barack Obama's State of the Union address have all been targets).

What's really devastating about these poisoned search results, is that the end-user isn't likely to realize they are getting infected, since the search result, may refer eventually to a well known site, like CNN. But the referring link will contain some piece of malware; infecting the end-user's machine.

All the more reason IT admins need to make sure there's a proxy in place acting as a Secure Web Gateway with the right anti-malware software, and for those traveling users on laptops, there's some local software client protecting web browsing as well.