According to a newly released report by Barracuda Labs, based on a two-month study reviewing more than 25,000 trending topics and 5.5 million search results, Google remains the most popular search engine used by malicious attackers, relying on poisoned keywords.
The company, which also sampled Yahoo Search, Bing, and Twitter, contributes Google’s leading position to the fact that Google remains the market share leader in online search, and consequently the most targeted search engine.
Key highlights of the study:
- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution – turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.
- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!
- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT. The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.
Interestingly, based on the data gathered, the most popular topic of choice for cybercriminals were spyware related searches, followed by entertainment news, with hosting sites, P2P and proxies related searches showing a significant growth. What’s worth highlighting while interpreting the data, is that it’s only valid for a specific period of time. How come? […]
