It is bad enough, for someone with no great interest in the monarchy, that the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has now dominated TV, print and online news outlets for the past 24 hours solid. I know I risk being verbally scolded by the twin-pronged pro-Royalty army that is the combined forces of the blue-rinsed brigade and readers of Heat magazine, but I think I can safely say that the forthcoming Royal wedding is now officially bad news. I can also say that you would be safer searching for porn than searching for news about the Royal nuptials.
Security researchers at the Websense labs have uncovered the first wave of poisoned search engine results to wash onto Google and Yahoo alike, using everything from promises of ‘Prince William Wedding Photos’ through to the much more generic, and likely all the more successful as a result, ‘Prince William Wedding’ as lures to sites which will hit the unsuspecting and unprotected visitor with the latest drive-by download attacks.
This should come as no great surprise, of course, as poisoned search results remain a popular method of driving traffic to infected sites. In fact, the recently published Websense Security Labs Threat Report suggests that a whopping 22.4% of all searches for current news actually lead to malicious results in some form or other. Can I say arse biscuits here? Too late, and I’m going to say it again, but louder: ARSE BISCUITS!
If the Websense figures are accurate, then that’s almost a quarter of all searches for a current news story end up with toxic results that could take you into dangerous online territory.
To put that figure into some perspective, it means that searching for current news stories is now more dangerous an activity than searching for porn, which could leads to malicious sites 21.8% of the time. It’s all the more worrying when you also take into account the fact that, according to the same report, some 79.9% of websites that contain malicious code are actually legitimate sites that have been compromised.
The answer is obvious (no, not search for porn instead of celebrity gossip and Royal news) and involves only visiting known and trusted sources when feeding your news habit. Although you can never say for sure that the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, The Sun or even PC Pro for that matter will never get compromised by some clever hacker, the chances of that happening are far, far less than the bad guys targeting an unpatched small business site server and pointing at that.
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