Infected Search Results Jump 80% During Holiday Season
Chris Larsen from Blue Coat Security shared new statistics on the number of poisoned search results during the holiday shopping season. The new stats show an 80% jump in the number of clicks on infected search results from their last report in August. Specifically, they tracked 13,616 different clicks over 10 days, which is an […]
Chris Larsen from Blue Coat Security shared new statistics on the number of poisoned search results during the holiday shopping season.
The new stats show an 80% jump in the number of clicks on infected search results from their last report in August. Specifically, they tracked 13,616 different clicks over 10 days, which is an average of 1361.6 different search engine poisoned clicks per day. During the August or Olympics research set, they had a total of 28,277 different search engine poisoned clicks in 39 days, which is about 725 per day. That is over an 80% increase in the number of daily clicks on search results that are infected.
How do they track a click on a poisoned search result? A user does a search they see a link high enough in the returned search results that they actually saw it; then thought it looked like a reasonable result; and decided to clicked it. Their software obviously blocked the malware but it tracked the click.
Here are some of the more popular Christmas related searches that led to malware of some sorts:
- preschool christmas bulletin boards
- crafts for christmas
- repurpose old christmas cards
- christmas office party games
- christmas scavenger list for adults
- ideas for christmas gifts in mason jars
- free printable christmas word scramble
- ugly christmas sweater party invitation wording
- christmas weight loss team names
You can learn more about this at Blue Coat.
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