It’s not uncommon for us to see cyber criminals targeting current events or upcoming holidays, but this time we came across a campaign that is several months ahead of schedule. An ongoing Blackhat SEO campaign is heavily targeting Halloween and Thanksgiving related keywords.
The Top 5 targeted keywords:
1. Printable (cards)
2. Halloween
3. Thanksgiving
4. Invitations
5. Turkey
Tag cloud of the 75 most targeted keywords:
Blackhat SEO targeting Halloween and Thanksgiving
Searching for any of the targeted phrases could yield the following search results:
Halloween/Thanksgiving Blackhat SEO Search Results
Clicking on any of the search results will lead us to the Desktop Security 2010 Rogueware campaign, which does a number of annoying things, such as hijacking web browsing sessions, repeatedly playing messages over the speakers (E.g. Your computer is infected), and generating popups.
Desktop Security 2010 Rogueware
Desktop Security 2010 Purchase Page
I hate those browser hijackers! Doesn’t Google block those kinds of websites?