Google has cut the number of malicious hackers that attack users of their search engine almost by half. These hackers are not going to competitor search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and Twitter.
At the end of December, hackers targeted Google 38% of the title; however, Google accounted for almost 70% of these attacks back in June. Google has increased its security even as the number of attacks has increased. The competitors have also noticed an increase in malware attacks as well. These criminals had placed 30% of their software on the Yahoo search engine which is up by 18% from those in June. The Bing search engine accounted for 24% which was an increase of 12% since June; Twitter has had an increase from 1% to 8% in malicious attacks over the same time frame.
In order to lower the number of malware attacks, Google has improved itself security cleaning; the company is being more aggressive with identifying and scrubbing attempts to prevent search-poisoning. Originally, if you stayed away from porn sites and other illegal or suspicious websites, you could avoid worms, Trojans, viruses, and other types of malware. Now, the cyber-thieves are infecting the search engine results which make it more difficult to avoid these dangerous programs.
Studies have shown that 1 out of every 3 popular search terms could produce results that lead to malicious codes. Once the code is on your computer, hackers can look around for important information on your computer like bank account information, Social Security numbers, tax information and other financial data. Once infected, your computer can also be used in other scams by the hackers – without your knowledge.
Security companies are working on more anti-virus programs but search engine organizations are trying to shift the focus to these types of malware. The rival companies are even sharing information with each other to better determine ways to defeat the hackers.
