Malware Hits Search Results — Google’s Malware Warnings Not Working?

Subverted search sites lead to massive malware attack in progress from ComputerWorld reports that Google, along with Yahoo, Live Search have been targeted in a massive attack that puts links leading to malware sites into top search results.

Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software’s CEO said “So far we’ve found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages. That’s 40,000 possible pages.” The pages are specifically being returned by search engines in their organic results (not the paid results). Eckelberry explains, “They get themselves on to Google, then redirect people to their malware pages.”

The SunBelt Blog has screen captures of this issue happening in Google’s organic results.

But doesn’t Google have a malware filter tool? See our past articles:

• Google Steps Up Web Page Malware Notifications
• Google Search Results Now May Display Malware Warnings
• Google Webmaster Tools Adds Malware Review Form
• Matt Cutts On Appealing Google Malware Warnings

Google has now removed the result in SunBelt’s example. But those results looked very similar to the Chinese Look-Alike Google Spam we reported from early September. But this can easily be a different issue.

For more coverage of this topic, check Techmeme.

NOTE: If you saw a malware warning on Jan. 31, 2009, this was due to an error that briefly impacted all web sites. See Google Gets Fearful, Flags Entire Internet As Malware Briefly, for more.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.