Although Bing is doing well to filter out malware sites in text searches, filtering image searches is more difficult. Photo: AFP
And while search engines and anti-virus software both provide protection from such attacks, this growing sophistication is making it harder to stop, particularly for image searches.
SophosLabs took search data from a two-week period and recorded the instances of malware redirects. Bing was the most affected, accounting for 65% of redirects, followed by Google, which despite being the world's most popular search engine, only accounted for 30% of malware redirects.
When the results were examined more closely, they revealed that rather than text (8%), it was image searches (92%) that were proving the most successful at poisoning search results.
These results show that while all search engines are doing well to block out suspicious URLs in text searches, it's more difficult to identify rogue images -- understandable given that search engines display image searches as a collection of pictures, and therefore users' suspicions may not be raised until after they have clicked through.
The SophosLabs Naked Security blog has posted a visual demonstration of what could happen when a user innocently searches Google for images of Prince William and Kate Middleton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIZwE1rlNR0.
To make sure that you don't make the same mistake, SophosLabs recommends that you:
* Take care and review the links provided by all search engines. Does it look suspicious or is the domain name unusual?
* Ensure that all filtering options offered by the search engine are activated.
* Ensure that your anti-virus protection is enabled and up to date to catch the redirects that the search engine might have missed.