McAfee Security Company recently released the results of a study highlighting the connection between internet viruses, spyware, and search engines.
The study revealed that through keyword queries, search engines can inadvertently include malicious websites in their search results.
McAfee conducted research on the five most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask from January to May. The researchers found that every search engine, even when using the most common keywords, returned potential websites that contained harmful code or malware.
For example, using popular keywords such as “free screensavers, digital music, popular software, and singers”, up to 72% of the results included links to websites that potentially posed dangers to users.
Overall, the average rate of threats returned in search results was around 5%, with 3% of those being high-risk websites that threatened users and 9% appearing in advertisements. Researchers compared this figure with the 2% rate among a total of 3.3 million websites identified by McAfee as being used for malware distribution.
“However, malware distributors, adware, harmful code, and many other dangerous issues quickly target the places where users frequently go, which are the search engines,” Chris added.
The results of McAfee’s study raise questions about whether major search engines are effectively combating malware on their search result pages. However, no search engine company has officially commented on McAfee’s findings yet.
Hoàng Dũng
