Tiger Woods (Searches) Not to Be Trusted

Tiger Woods’ personal life and marital affairs have attracted constant attention from the press and has certainly damaged his public reputation.  With his return to the Masters only days away, Nike has released a new commercial in an effort to rebuild Woods’ image.  This compelling commercial is intended to spark a reaction, and may well be the next thing you talk about at the office water cooler.  Anyone who hasn’t seen it will go right back to their desk and search for the video. Blackhats have once again worked their way into these search results, leading users to malicious sites and Rogue Anti-Virus downloads. 

A user looking to see the commercial online would likely search “tiger woods commercial” – the search is heavily poisoned.  Out of the top 7 search results, six lead to Fake Anti-Virus pages begging the user to install malicious software.  The video results have also been poisoned to do the same.

With low anti-virus detection rates, users tricked by this attack have little to prevent them from installing downloaded malware.  In fact, only 1 out of the 20 scanners on Jotti detected the payload as malicious.

Users should also be wary of any Masters’ related searches as these will also be a target of cyber criminals. eSoft’s proactive detection of these attacks protects any SiteFilter customers.  Any sites associated with these attacks are being flagged as malicious or compromised.

[Additional Note: In this particular attack, the referring site is also important.  If the user is not coming from Google, or presumably other search engines they will be redirected to cnn.com rather than the malicious site.  eSoft has noted the use of this technique in the past, but it is interesting the attackers have chosen CNN for use in this campaign.]