Worms use Google to hunt for victims
Malware authors are increasingly starting to create digital pests that use the Google search engine to find their next victim.
The automated vulnerability detection is the latest trend in a technique that is know as "Google hacking", McAfee's senior vice president for Risk Management George Kutz told vnunet.com after a presentation about the phenomenon at the RSA Security conference in San Jose.
The Santy.a worm for instance was targeting a known vulnerability in some versions of phpBB to deface websits. It found its victims through an automated Google search query. Google eventually stopped the worm from spreading by blocking all searches that would turn up servers running the application. But the search engine will only be able to detect the abuse if the queries stand out between from the other searches.
