Halloween-themed black hat SEO attacks have already started

WEB SECURITY VENDOR Websense warns about black hat internet search engine optimization (BHSEO) attacks that poison Google's search results related to Halloween.

It's a known fact that cyber criminals don't miss any chance to profit from events that grab the public's attention. Be they holidays, natural disasters or celebrity deaths, everything is fair game for these people.

It's no surprise to see search result poisoning campaigns targeting Halloween, but it is a little unusual to see such attacks nearly one month before the holiday,

"We start with the search term 'halloween skeleton templates,' which brings up a poisoned search result. The link redirects users to what appears to be a fake YouTube site," the Websense security researchers explain.

"The fake YouTube site uses nude images of celebrities like Emma Watson and Paris Hilton as a ploy. These, along with salacious captions, are meant to entice users into playing the apparent video," they add.

Of course, none of the listed videos are real and trying to play any of them will prompt users to install a fake Flash Player update. This is definitely not a new trick, but its continuous use in social engineering scams indicates that it still has a high success rate.

Google has made significant efforts to improve its detection of black hat SEO campaigns and to some extent it has been successful. The problem is nowhere near as bad as it was a year ago, but attacks like this are proof that the threat persists.

Moreover, since now they need to invest more resources to bypass the protections of Google's web search engine, attackers have migrated towards the company image search web sites or internet search alternatives like Yahoo and Bing, which are really the same thing, as Bing drives Yahoo.

Halloween-themed attacks are only going to increase as the holiday approaches, and poisoned search results are not the only threat users need to be wary about. Social networking spam and rogue downloads are also common attack vectors. µ