Though it was F-Secure who warned bloggers against the harm that SEP might incur to their business, it was Imperva that found the true understanding of how SEP works in connection to Search Engine Optimization. Imperva reportedly claimed to have monitored the attack for the past 15 months without any counter-measure from any search engines.
What is SEP? SEP stands for Search Engine Poisoning and is a black-hat SEO technique that is used in referring legitimate sites to malware infected sites. These malware infected sites are often considered to be sponsored links on Google which when clicked inject HTML codes on popular sites in installing the malware.
How SEP works? Consider a site named "zyx" which is related to e-commerce and is being infected by SEP on Google search. SEP infects a site by installing some sort of malicious code, sometimes XSS on the site it is targeting. In this case it's "xyz". Now when an unknown user clicks the site "xyz", it is actually installing the malware from the site and is becoming a host of it. Later the malware of the site "xyz" would help the user refer to any other site it is intending to visit. Now the referred site might not be an e-commerce site which would definitely hit the appeal of looking for an e-commerce site.
There is another version of the working of SEP where an attacker would exploit the vulnerability in the CMS of the site or the hosting web server. He/She then uploads and installs the SEO application. This application is capable of generating dynamic SEO pages and even in extracting search results as text from Google. Metadata can be extracted from the search engine results and then can be added to the links on SEO pages. The generated content can also be cached by the SEO kit.
The SEO pages then link to other pages and get indexed. Thus when a user clicks on the infected search results, the requested result gets redirected to the malicious site.
SEP advantages and dis-advantages Advantage: The one advantage of SEP to hackers is that they can perform their task of installing malware and then can refer users to their desired location without even taking over or breaking into any servers. Just by compromising vulnerability, one is able to perform the illegal task of SEP.
Dis-advantage:
One can damage its own product brand name. Losing important customers base. Driving away potential customers. Decreased ranking. Crawling and indexing of the site becomes almost impossible. Devastating economic implications.SEP Facts and Figures
Search Engine Poisoning is a part of Attack 2.0 Bad guys use the popular search terms on Google to SEP victims. 10 percent of the search results from Google are malicious sites. SEP tools are mostly written as PHP scripts.Protection from SEP
Content inspection and filtering. Payload detection. Educating users. Enabling browser security features. Enabling computer security features. Installing anti-virus and anti-malwares. Contextual Link Building and Squidoo Lens Creation to Optimize Your Website How to Find the Pay Off of Your SEO Work Top SEO Tips To Raise Your Website's Search Engine Rankings Protecting Your Websites Serp Rankings in 2013 Mobile SEO Techniques: Capture Your Mobile Customers Now The New SEO - Life After Panda and Penguin
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