Microsoft Safety And Security Center Hacked To Present Porn

Last week, attackers hacked the Microsoft Safety and Security Center search engine to return adult-oriented results, studded with malware links.

"The Microsoft Safety and Security Center has become a hot bed of porn redirects, and sleazy porn sites invariably lead to malware," said Alex Eckelberry, the vice president and general manager of GFI's security division, in a blog post, after spotting the attack on Friday.

Blackhat search engine optimization (SEO), also known as search poisoning, involves filling search results at sites such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft Bing with fake results that link to advertisements or malware. Such attacks aren't anything new. In fact, while results vary by search term, according to one study, about 22% of current news searches, as well as searches for "objectionable content," return links to poisoned or infected websites.

But this attack was different, because it only returned poisoned search results for very specific terms.

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