Google gets booby-trapped

Cyber crooks have duped Google Video Search engine into giving malicious pages high rankings; these can infect computers

Google gets booby-trapped

Cyber crooks have duped Google Video Search engine into giving malicious pages high rankings; these can infect computers

Next time you use the Google Video Search to get your daily online video fix, be cautious while clicking on those search engine links. You will never know what you are going to get when you click on those.

The Google Video Search engine contains booby-trapped web pages on the top of its search results. And when hit, they can inflict computers with deadly viruses.

"The search result would redirect the users to the malicious sites instead of pointing them to a video link," said researchers at Trend Micro, an Internet content security. The company found malware threats have spread on 4,00,000 queries on the search engine. The threat, which the company nicknamed WORM_AQPLAY.A., tries to deceive users in believing that they are being redirected to a site that would update their Adobe Flash Player to view the videos yielded by the search engine.

"Once the software is activated, it will lead to an infection that would spread through the users' personal computer including removable and network drives," the researchers said.

"These domains have keyword-riddled pages, so they appear on top of search results when users enter certain related strings. A user, thinking that top search results are reliable, is then unknowingly trapped into visiting a malicious website," they added.

And once it happens it is tough to clean the computers. "Cases of virus attack have increased considerably. Around 80 per cent of cases we get are of virus attack. To clean infected computer completely is difficult task as there is chance of data loss so we delete infected file only," said Lalit Kumar, a Delhi-based computer expert.

"Popular search sites are main area where hackers attack. These hackers use keywords so that search engine shows their link first and users trust the link which is shown first and gets infected," said Vivek Vohra, a cyber expert.

The threat was successfully cloaked by the hackers leaving them unnoticeable by users.

Trend Micro also noted that the hackers maintain several domains containing high-density targeted keywords that place high on Google video searches.