Malware creators, cyber-criminals and other such scum are aware of where most of the internet activity is: Use of search engines (Google, Bing) social media websites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and therefore try to use those trends to infect your computer. How?

Black Hat SEO techniques: SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, Black Hat SEO techniques are those used to illicitly manipulate search engine results in order to drive up the search ranking result of a particular website. This can then be used to make iwillinfectyourcomputer.com be in the first few results of any search. You search Google for “Michael Jackson death” and there it is, a fake quote on that subject and a link to take you to the website where that quote is. Looks legit too. Even the website name can look legit, like “KYWA-News.com”, but if you click on that search result to go to the website, it either takes you to that website and it’s a fake news website, or worse, when you click on the link it re-directs your computer to land in another website. Either way the result is the same: you land in a website and by virtue of it your computer gets infected, if you don’t have the proper protection and system updates in place.

A new client  with an infected computer told me recently that there was no antivirus installed in his machine because he figured if he never opened any suspicious email attachments… I rapidly disabused him of the idea, shortly before I disinfected his computer of some nasty malware. With these new infection techniques, you can get infected just by what used to be considered normal web-surfing. But that client’s comment also told me that users at large might not be as aware of this phenomenon as they need to be. Hence, this article.

So, 1) Get or improve protection in your computer as covered here, 2) Make sure your computer is updated with the latest security patches as covered here, 3) Just be aware of the above ongoing phenomena and be extra careful when clicking on search results links, or any phony looking links posted in social media websites.