Malware Exploits Conficker Interest

As we noted in a recent post titled Spamdexing Surges:

Using Google Trends and other keyword popularity reports, attackers are able to quickly gauge interest levels, then leverage the current interest levels in a given topic to quickly push links pointing to malware whenever searches on that topic are performed.

It seems the interest in the Conficker worm, drummed up by the 60 Minutes report, has led to a somewhat ironic development. Though the April 1st doomsday prediction by the 60 Minutes report was misguided at best, the report has caused a great many people to search for terms like "Conficker" or "virus April 1". And that has led to attackers spamdexing those keywords so that links returned by the search engines for those keywords are pointing to malware.

For visuals, check out the Google Trends report for those terms.

This is unfortunate. Erroneous reporting of threats, i.e. crying wolf, can result in a loss of credibility and a lack of faith in security vendors. But in this case, the erroneous reporting has a further consequence - the interest raised is actually putting users at greater risk of infection from other malware.