Study: Malicious Search Results More Common In Bing & Image Search

Almost two of every three malicious redirects in major search engines are found on Bing, according to a new report from the web security firm Sophos.

Looking at data “from the last couple of weeks,” Sophos found that 65 percent of malicious search results that its web appliance blocked were from Bing. Google was responsible for 30 percent of the blocked redirects.

Image search is particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. In a separate chart, Sophos says that 92 percent of the malicious redirects that it found were in image search results.

Sophos is using its own technology here to measure how many malicious redirects it’s blocking. Hackers often compromise legitimate web pages with hidden redirects that often only impact visitors coming from search engines. When a user clicks on a search result expecting to be taken to a legitimate site, the malicious redirect instead sends the user to a malicious site.

Sophos is saying that this is happening more often from Bing’s search results than Google’s, at least over the past couple weeks. A couple years ago, a study that examined malware in search results over a two-month period labeled Google the “King of Malware.”