After the last presidential election, hacker have bought their way to the top of the Google results pages by buying keyword searches sweeping through Barack Obama’s election victory.
For most of the day last November 5 and 6, searches involving the keyword Obama generated a sponsored link which read “Download Now” at the top of the results pages. And users who click in this link would reach a website infected with malicious software, in which security experts confirmed that it could compromise PC user’s security.
Graham Cluley, the senior technology consultant of Sophos, a online security company, said that “[the website] is infected with a malicious i-frame,in which the code then downloads further malware onto your PC, including something called Mal/Pdfex-B. Ultimately this code is designed to compromise your computer and allow hackers to have remote control over your PC.”
The trend before was hackers using the keywords for terrorist attacks to gain access to pertinent information of the users like banking password and credit cards. But lately, security companies has noticed that the surge recently proves that they make use of Obama’s name as a bait.
“We are also seeing a major malicious spam campaign featuring Obama at the moment, which points to a malware download,” Cluley added. “We’re gathering information about that right now.”
The links were removed immediately, but Google remains to make no comments on individual adverts.
A spokesperson said that “It’s difficult to talk about security without giving away what we do. We do have a very sophisticated manual and automatic system for removing adverts that may be suspicious.”
By this time, these links has already been removed.
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