Menlo Park (ip-192.com): Online scammers are taking advantage of users interested in the Google Doodle, Google’s special logo collection, to spread malware, using a technique called "SEO poisoning." They create special malware-rigged Web sites or hide malware on legitimate Web sites they've compromised and then use tags associated with popular search terms to get them listed high up in search engine results.
A Google doodle on Tuesday showed a flag for Esperanto, a universal language created by L.L. Zamenhof, CNet reports. Clicking on the doodle generated an awful lot of malicious search results for "L.L. Zamenhof."
Dave Michmerhuizen, a research scientist at Barracuda Networks, found 31 poisoned sites among the first 100 results, 27 of them in the first 50 sites alone. On the first results page was a link leading to a compromised Web site that redirects visitors to a fake antivirus site, according to Michmerhuizen. That site displays a fake alert saying the computer might be infected and does a fake scan before prompting the user to pay for antivirus software, he said.
"I see this all the time," he said. "Poisoning a trend is nothing new, but in this particular case, it's a search where you actually click on Google's logo and you get results back from sites where half of the links have been compromised."
Google doodles have been produced for the birthdays of several noted artists and scientists, including Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Louis Braille, Michael Jackson, H. G. Wells, Samuel Morse and Mohandas Gandhi, among others. The celebration of historical events is another common topic of Google Doodles including a Lego brick design in celebration of the interlocking Lego block's 50th anniversary. The anniversary of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds has also been celebrated.
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