Bing, Yahoo! serving malware for popular search terms

Bing results for popular search terms such as “Firefox/Skype/AdobePlayer/uTorrent download” have been poisoned with bogus websites pushing a variety of malware.

On some, like the above search results for “uTorrent download” (click on the screenshot to enlarge it), the offered malicious pages’ URL seems like the real deal.

But once the user follows the link and lands on the page, the URL has changed. The pages are pretty believable copies of the original ones.

The malware served on all these pages comes from en-softonic(dot)ne. Users looking for Firefox get a rootkit, their IE begins working silently in the background attempting click fraud, and their Google search results get redirected to pages chosen by the attackers.

GFI warns that Yahoo! users are liable to get served with these links, as well. Both Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified of this and hopefully the results will be cleaned soon.

Unfortunately, you can count on similar schemes to pop up daily, so be careful from which page you download the software you need.

You’re best bet is their official pages (check the URL when you land on them), although – as we have recently witnessed with the uTorrent.com compromise – even that isn’t always a sure way to keep your computer clean.