Sophos Cloud Optix
A tragedy occurred on Friday morning when Nodar Kumaritashvilii of Georgia died during a luge training run for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. As we’ve seen with many other high profile deaths lately, it was only a matter of minutes before searches for the video rocketed to the #1 search trend on Google. In fact, at one point 16 of the top 20 searched terms all had to do with people in search of the video. Even now the #2 search term is “luger who died video” and so it was only a matter of time before malware began to appear.
Plenty of SEO poisoned page have popped up in the first page of various search results. Searching for the name “Nodar Kumaritashvilii” alone will even result in multiple malware pages in the top ten results, pointing to the usual FakeAV pages we’ve seen over the past couple years. It’s unfortunate that even a tragic death isn’t off limits by malware authors trying to make a quick buck.
If you’re looking for Olympic related news we advise sticking to reputable news sources or the official Vancouver 2010 Olympics website. It’s likely that all hot topics specific to the Olympics will be abused via SEO poisoning over the next couple of weeks so keep that in mind when Googling for the latest news.