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By Bill Brenner

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Earthquake in Japan: Bad guys target search results

Posted March 11, 2011 to Data Protection |

The dregs of cyberspace have already started to exploit the tragedy in Japan.

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Norman Ingal, a threat response engineer at Trend Micro, wrote of poisoned search results in the company blog:

We immediately monitored for any active attacks as soon as news broke out, and true enough we saw web pages inserted with key words related to the earthquake. One of the active sites that we saw used the keyword “most recent earthquake in Japan” and led to FAKEAV variants we currently detect as Mal_FakeAV-25.

Blackhat SEO leading to rogue antivirus is still very much a common Web attack. We recommend that our readers get the latest news from trusted media outlets to prevent being victimized by this blackhat SEO.

The blog post provides links to trusted news sites and includes screen shots of the poisoned search results.

Our hearts go out to the people of Japan in this painful time. Coincidentally, the tragedy comes just a few days after Trend micro CEO Eva Chen paid us a visit.

--Bill Brenner

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