Cyber Criminals use Search Engines

Unless you work for or own an online business, chances are you’ve never heard the terms “search engine optimization” (SEO) and “search engine marketing” (SEM). Yet these two phrases—SEO (the effort by site owners to get their website ranked higher by search engines) and SEM (the use of paid advertising to gain prominent placement on search engines) are increasingly important vocabulary for businesses that seek to prosper on the web. Unfortunately, legitimate businesses are not the only ones gaining fluency with this new language. The cyber criminals, from singular ones to organized groups, have realized that the same search engines that enable legitimate businesses to reach more consumers can also be used by criminals to separate more victims from more of their money.

In a study conducted by McAfee, Inc., they have identified that the riskiest set of keyword variations was “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1% and an average risk of 34.4%, substantially higher than expected averages. Consumers looking to save money, and/or searching for means of additional income, should take note: searchers clicking on results that contain the word “free” have a 21.3 percent chance of infecting their PCs with online threats, such as spyware, spam, phishing, adware, viruses and other malware. “Work from home” searches can be as much as four times riskier than the average risk for all popular terms.

How does one keyword differ from another one, in terms of cyber weightage. The difference in two keywords is exactly its search engine results based costing, and has a direct relationship towards the number of searches made per day. Though it is difficult to understand the motives and modus of most of the cyber criminals, they also think of themselves as successful provided they can lure more victims to these phishing site. Mostly victims are coaxed into downloading a computer program into their system. People of any walks of the life, and any age group could get duped. As people continue to convert their music collection into mp3 and other digital format, they struggle between the cost of buying and converting. And once they are ready to download off the Internet, they are atleast prepared to download something, and this makes the malware authors work eaiser.

To Continue Reading: Click Here
---------------------------------------------
Source: keralaonline.com