I use search engines to look up everything. Recipes, news, info on whatever interest me at the moment, everything can be found at after typing a few words in the search bar. Since it’s become commonplace to use search engines, hackers look for ways to exploit this habit. Typing popular keywords can return even risky sites in the first pages results, since search engines have little to no filtering security measures being implemented. Sites with sponsored ads are even more likely to contain embedded adware and trojans. Though search engines may have advertising policies and listing and ranking rules about which sites show up in their search results, it’s up to the user’s good judgment to select what sites they will visit.
Search engines can also be a doorway to malware because of caching. Caches are used to store a backup copy of data temporarily. Search engines like Google and MSN save a virtual copy of a site in their servers, so even if a site goes down or is inaccessible due to slow connection speeds, the information and data can still be retrieved. Companies and service providers often use caching servers to speed up performance and lessen traffic in the network. But what if the site has a piece of malicious code embedded into its pages? Caches don’t save everything on a page, but a malicious piece of javascript will be part of the copy. The cached copy is identical to the original in that aspect, so accessing a cached page will have the same effect as accessing the original. So keep that in mind while browsing through your search results.
[tags]search engines, caching[/tags]