When Search Bites Your Ankle
February 27, 2009
Search means Google. I suppose one can be generous and include Live.com and Yahoo.com search in the basket even though search is, for most people, Google. When I read “Malware Tricking Search Engines, and You Too” here, I auto inserted Google whether or not the author wanted me to. The point of the write up is that bad nerds figured out a way to spoof Facebook users, for example. This is a bit like snookering the seven year old neighbor’s kid at Halloween in my opinion. The idea is that
if you Googled “Error Check System” you were pushed links to malware-infested sites. The recent GMail outage produced a similar problem; Googling “Gmail Down” got you lots of malware.
My question is, “Where does the responsibility rest?” Is the operating system outfit responsible? Is the search vendor responsible? Is the Web site responsible? For me, the most interesting comment in the story was this stunner:
the end result was to push rogue anti-malware to the user. This really does seem to the star of the malware world in that it directly brings in money.
Two comments: Maybe the author would like to have a malware Oscar like award for this “star of the malware world.” And, yep, make the user responsible. Most computing device users really know what’s what with their systems. Great idea. The buck stops where? At my 84 year old father. Right. He’s able to spot malware just fine. I bet he does this as well as your mother and father do.
Stephen Arnold, February 27, 2009
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