How search engine poisoning works
Imperva disclosed the intricate workings of a Search Engine Poisoning (SEP) campaign. The attack was extremely successful and continued to run for at least 15 months without any apparent counter-measures employed by search engines.
This acutely illustrates how websites - often unbeknownst to their administrator - and Web search engines become the conduit for these types of attack and demonstrates that more needs to be done to stop malware being spread in this fashion.
Search Engine Poisoning attacks manipulate, or "poison", search engines to display search results that contain references to malware-delivering websites. There are a multitude of methods to perform SEP: taking control of popular websites; using the search engines' "sponsored" links to reference malicious sites; and injecting HTML code.
