Blackhat SEO has been the dark side of search engine optimisation for many years and using unethical techniques to direct unsuspecting search users towards malicious websites is a problem that the major search engines know all about, making numerous algorithm changes in order to try and prevent it.
However, according to a new study, Bing and Google aren’t doing too well in their efforts, as a massive 95% of malicious redirects affect users of the two leading search engines.
The new report by web security firm Sophos found that while testing the company’s own “Web appliance” for poisoned searches that blackhat’s were using to direct traffic to pay day loan sites, 65 percent of search results blocked were from Bing, with Google responsible for 30 percent.
“Taking data from the last couple of weeks for search engine redirects blocked on our Web appliance, it is clear that the majority of the redirects are affecting those using the Bing search engine,” wrote Fraser Howard on the Sophos company blog.
Although 30 percent is a very significant number, the fact that Google has a 66.4 percent market share compared to just 15.9 percent of Microsoft, makes it slightly more understandable that poisoned searches will slip through the net. However, 65 per cent is a very worrying figure for Bing, especially as they are already fighting a losing battle against Google in attracting users.
Poisoned Images
“Search engine poisoning” as it is known is the main way of delivering malware via the internet. A common practice for those using banned SEO tactics is to comprise an otherwise genuine web page with hidden redirects that only affect those visiting via a search engine.
“Digging further into the data, it is also clear that the attackers are getting most success from poisoning image search results,” Howard notes. According to the data, it is not text searches that are the problem, but images. The search engines seem to be doing a pretty decent job of keeping malicious text to a minimum, with just 8 percent of sites detected by Sophos coming from text searches. However, the remaining 92% of malicious sites are all image searches.
It is much easier for search engines to detect malicious text than it is images, but it is clear that poisoned image search results are having too much success and that much more could be done by both Bing and Google to stop them.
